“But I’m not ready to settle down.”
“I’m not secure enough in my career to think about marriage.”
“We’re still working on becoming the best versions of ourselves.”
These were all thoughts that were swirling around in my head before I proposed to my husband after 5 years of dating.
But in all that time, we hadn’t really gone on many “traditional” dates – we hadn’t exactly had a “traditional” trajectory at all, having been assigned as random roommates through a roommate matching app (we still joke about the fact that we bypassed dating apps and moved right in together). We were both musicians, and it wasn’t long before we connected beyond more than just music.
But musicians’ lives are anything but traditional. We both had multiple offshoots and avenues of pursuing our own interests – and with that, multiple different jobs.
Fast-forward to the day I proposed to him – we had just returned from Firefly Music Festival, both exhausted and exhilarated from the weekend, and as soon as we got home, we plopped down on the couch, and picked up right where we left off: watching The Sopranos.
I heated up some leftovers and walked into the living room; the iconic theme song (which we never skipped) began to play, and we started swirling our forks in the air to the rhythm of the music in a celebratory fashion, as if to say, “It’s good to be home.”
When the theme song ended, I asked Eric to pause the show, and without trepidation, the words came out of my mouth: “Marry me.”
“Is this… a real proposal?” Eric asked hesitantly, and we burst out in laughter.
We had talked so casually and so frequently about getting married “one day” that the “magic” of the moment of a proposal felt almost contrived at this point – as if we were putting the “proposal on a pedestal” – but the feelings were there, and they were real.
With The Sopranos on pause, we talked about how all of the same reservations we’d had about marriage and “settling down” were still swirling around in our heads:
What if I decided to completely change careers and finally work at an ad agency instead of freelance?
Or go back to school and become a speech therapist?
What if he wanted to get his Doctorate in music composition?
Or open a restaurant?
How could we make a promise like marriage when we still felt so uncertain about our own individual trajectories?
But it wasn’t long before we started poking fun at our own concerns. We started saying things like, “I do – musician or astronaut; singer or speech therapist; cook or composer.” We realized that these were just some of the “unexpected paths” we could already imagine – which by default, made them somewhat in the realm of possibility.
Marriage is a leap of faith – and the only thing that is certain is that unexpected things will inevitably arise – all we needed to be sure of was our willingness to face them together.
For example, we hadn’t exactly expected COVID, or a pandemic-move from Brooklyn to the Catskills in 2020. We had no idea that we’d love it here as much as we do, or that we’d stay for as long as we have. We didn’t plan on setting up a home studio, or being able to fully record and self-produce our own albums, nor did we expect to find so many other musicians in the area who we would call friends – and we definitely didn’t expect getting married at a fly-fishing resort in Hancock, NY on August 12, 2023.
We didn’t expect October 7th – less than 2 months after our wedding day – or the challenges that would arise from being in an interfaith marriage in what was supposed to be our “honeymoon phase.”
I didn’t expect to want to potentially spend a significant amount of time in Israel in the not-too-distant future; he didn’t expect to get a call from an old professor recommending him for a Doctorate program in music composition on the West Coast.
I have often wondered whether I would relocate for love – married or not. While there are some places I have absolutely no desire to move to, if you’re with the right person, it can make you feel like wherever you are together is “home.”
This year (Valentine’s Day 2024), February 14th fell on a Wednesday, and there aren’t many romantic places or date spots around us that are open mid-week (yes, that’s how rural we’re living… now you can see why we want to move). Eric prepared the most beautiful steak dinner, and I made dessert: Claire Saffitz’s Forever Brownies – which might be the most appropriately-themed Valentine’s Day dessert ever. Over dinner, we reflected on just how much has changed since we became husband and wife – and how much stronger we are now than we’ve ever been before.
Although we can’t predict what opportunities will arise, or which ones will respond to us first, we’ve also stopped trying to figure it all out – we’re putting our feelers out and seeing what bites – and we’ll go from there.
But we do agree on one important thing – we both want to move; and we agree on something else that is probably equally as important – where we end up isn’t as important as being there together.