I'm so excited to announce the winner of our Engagement Session Giveaway, Holly & Eric! Holly is a fourth-year medical student and Eric is a journalist. They met in 2001 at the University of Maryland, College Park, where we both worked at the school paper. Here's their cute winning engagement story entry:
August 11, 2007, was a Saturday. I was a third-year medical student nearing the end of my first clinical rotation, which happened to be in Ob/Gyn. I was ending the rotation with a week of overnight shifts on the labor and delivery unit, and it was a tough adjustment to a 5pm-5am schedule. Every morning I would come home and crash for as long as possible, then wake up and do it again. By the end of that week, my brain was pretty addled from the wacky sleep schedule. Saturday morning I got home, and noticed the apartment (that I share with Eric) was clean (this is an unusual thing for us), but didn't think much of it, as my goal was to get in bed as quickly as possible. When I woke up from my coma nine hours later, I was excited, because it was officially the weekend, and the end of my overnight shifts, and I would get to hang out with Eric like a normal human being, instead of like a zombie. We decided to go out for dinner -- nothing fancy, just a reflection of our lack of desire to cook at that moment, which happens fairly frequently -- and decided on a place we had heard great things about but had never tried. I noticed, on the way there, that Eric was doing extra-chivalrous things, like opening the car door for me (which he does do fairly often, I have to admit, but I took notice because he was doing it with *every* door). I also noticed that once our food came, he ate hardly any of it, which is unusual for him, but he easily explained it away and I didn't think much of it. While at dinner, he suggested we do something else fun we had never done before, which was visit the jazz club in town. He had even planned ahead and knew that the show started at 9:30 pm, so we had a few hours to kill (I had woken up in the late afternoon and we went out for a senior-citizen-early dinner). He suggested going back to the apartment and having a glass of wine to kill some time, and I thought it sounded like a good idea.
So back to the apartment we went, and we opened a bottle of wine and snuggled on the couch for a bit. He then suggested a writing exercise we tried once back in college. It involves taking turns writing a sentence and seeing where the resulting story ends up. I thought it was a good idea, so he started the story with a line that introduced a hero named Eric and a heroine named Holly. Then it was my turn, and I wrote something completely ridiculous about kittens who drink beer. He brought the story back to reality, and I wrote another ridiculous sentence. He dropped a line about how much "Eric loved Holly" and I said something about about vaginas and placentas (I had just finished 8 weeks of Ob/Gyn, you have to remember!). He kept bringing the story back to something that was starting to sound suspiciously romantic, and I kept derailing it. This was very uncharacteristic, because I am normally the one to write sappy romantic things, and his uncharacteristic behavior was unsettling. All of a sudden, I wondered if he might be about to do something like propose, and, not knowing what else to do, I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I needed to think, and the wine we had been drinking was preventing me from doing that clearly. While in the bathroom, I panicked. If he WAS about to propose, then what the heck was I doing in the bathroom? Or, what if he needed me to leave for a few minutes so he could light candles or something (I had a vision of the scene from "Friends" when Monica proposed to Chandler)? But if he was planning to light candles, how would he know that I would have gone to the bathroom? But then staying in the bathroom any longer was just going to become awkward... so I came out. As I walked back into the living room, I looked around nervously, but there was not a candle to be seen. Instead, Eric was sitting on the couch, sipping his wine casually, and said, "it's your turn." So I looked at the page, and he had written, "Eric finally thought of his next sentence, and it went like this: And then, without further ado, it happened."
And right on cue, I looked up and turned to him, and said, "And then what happened?"
And he pulled the box from his pocket and said a whole bunch of stuff neither of us can remember, and got down on one knee and asked me to marry him! I was crying, and said yes, and we kissed and he put the ring on my finger and we started calling people we knew to share the news. And then I put everything from the last 12 hours together (the clean apartment, the opening of car doors, the lack of appetite) and it all made sense. It wasn't just my addled, sleep-deprived brain; he really HAD been up to something!
We popped open a bottle of champagne and made plans to meet some friends at a bar a little while later. We never did make it to the jazz club. It was a perfect proposal for us, and I can't imagine him doing it any other way!
Congrats Holly & Eric! I can't wait to meet you both and have fun with your session!