The difference between my two engagements.

All the cool girls have a failed engagement.

I never planned on getting engaged more than once.

As a self-confessed hopeless romantic, I always imagined that I would find the love of my life, get engaged, get married, and live happily ever after. Classic stuff, you know?

So, imagine my surprise when I got engaged (the first time) and found that it was nothing like I thought it would be.

I should probably prelude this by saying I should have never said yes to the proposal, and that was something that was entirely my own fault. I was having doubts about the relationship months before it, but when it finally happened, when he gave me what was, at the time, my dream proposal, I couldn’t say anything but yes. It just seemed be the right answer.

After all, when a man does everything you have ever dreamed of, when a man is kind and generally a decent human being, why would you break up with him?

I was convinced that I was just having cold feet, that my mental health issues were manipulating everything.

I thought it would get better over time.

But as we started thinking about a wedding, as we began to visit venues and I began to try wedding dresses on, there was always a strange little niggling feeling in my gut that said nothing was quite right. I hated every venue I visited. I refused to book any suppliers. And when people asked when the wedding was, I would change the topic.

My mama gifted me a beautiful wedding planning book from Kate Spade when I first got engaged that has a little section at the front - This book belongs to the future Mrs…

And no matter how many times I stared at it, I could never bring myself to write his surname. In fact, I never wrote anything in the book. It remained blank for years.

Over the years, I’ve seen quite a few people (online and in real life) end their engagements. I actually think it’s quite a common thing, and I now jokingly say that all the cool girls have a practise run before the real thing.

And I think a lot of people wonder how you could ever let yourself get into an engagement if you weren’t truly in love with someone. But as I mentioned earlier, when you’re in the throes of a relationship and there’s nothing particularly ‘wrong’ with it - i.e. there’s no cheating, no disloyalty, no concrete reason to end things - it’s almost harder to end things than if there had been.

I convinced myself that it was a me problem, when it was almost certainly a ‘we’ problem. We just weren’t a good match.

And so, when I finally ended things, I hoped and prayed that one day I’d find the one where it felt right. Where I’d get engaged and there would be no doubts, no hesitations, no niggling feeling in my gut.

This very thing happened last December.

And you know what the first thing I did when I woke up the following morning was?

I wrote his surname in the wedding planning book.

We chose a wedding date instantly.

We booked everything.

It was finally easy.

There’s really not much else to say other than that. It was just simple.

And honestly, part of me will always be grateful for my first engagement so I could appreciate the second even more.