This Sunday will mark the one year anniversary of me and Jena being all husband and wifey so I thought I’d tell the story about how she stole my proposal idea.

I decided that I was going to ask Jena to marry me in the summer of 2009. I was collecting unemployment and doing some stand up here and there. Enough money to pay the bills but not pay for a wedding. I had resolved to not ask until I had a steady job. On the way back from a show in Iowa I did a phone interview with Comcast that seemed to go well and they said they’d call again to set up a face to face interview in the next few days. That was close enough to having a job for me so I planned out my proposal.

There is a tree on the sidewalk behind the apartment building she lived in at the time. When we first started dating, I asked to come over to her her place under the (kind of) false pretense of bumming a cigarette. We smoked under that tree the first night we kissed. I was going to ask her to come out for a smoke and get down on one knee. I was writing a speech in my head for a whole week trying to properly express how she made me feel and how I wanted to feel that way for the rest of my life.

Then I chucked all that out the window and stammered out a rambling proposal in bed because I’m a fucking moron.

I still don’t know what came over me to decide that was the perfect time and not this grand scheme that I had playing out in my head. We were just in bed (fully clothed), holding hands and talking. Shooting the breeze. I then started choking and stuttering about “how… how the last year has… b-been really good. Like, the best year of my l-life and I don’t kn-know if, I hope it’s been really g-good for you because I was thinking.”

The worst part about all of it was that after fifteen seconds of me falling down a flight of verbal stairs I could tell she knew what I was getting to. The look in her eyes and the expression on her face screamed that she knew I was going to ask her to marry me and she was going to say “yes”. I could see that plain as day but that didn’t stop me from two more minutes of twisting in the wind and stammering bullshit about how we were “really cool together”.

After I finished, she said “yes” and all the requisite phone calls were made I told her about my plan with the tree and the speech. She agreed that it was very romantic and I should have done that instead.

Several weeks later, with the engagement in full swing she asked me to come out back for a smoke. We went out under the tree but before we lit our cigarettes she got down on one knee and asked me to marry her. I accepted. Now every time we go by the old apartment she’ll point and say “Hey, remember when I proposed to you under that tree?”

Happy anniversary, you idea stealing bitch. I love you mostest <#.