I’m standing in a hotel room in Long Beach, California with all the lights out. The window of the hotel room is large and long, overlooking a night sky of dark clouds and a bay of twinkling boat lights bouncing in the water. I’m staring out this window, my stomach turning with nervous excitement. It has to be tonight, I told myself again for what must have been the 47th time. A trip to Long Beach. A beautiful hotel overlooking the bay. A nice dinner and a comedy show, a date for which we both dressed up for beyond any other explanation other than it had to be the night. The night I have been waiting for over a year now.
As I stare out the window, intentionally looking like an adorable, nonchalant woman who totally isn’t thinking about her boyfriend behind her getting ready to drop down on one knee, I smile with anticipation. I can’t wait to tell this story to anyone who asks. I was staring longingly over the Pacific ocean, looking for the answer to humanity in the pitch black night sky, when he asked me. This, I figure, is how old timey movies portray engagements. Only instead of smoking one long cigarette and ashing on the hotel floor (as I assume would be necessary if this were, indeed, an old movie, because smoking was cool and people were rude enough to ash anywhere) I’m shifting my weight from one heel to the other and nursing a bloated stomach from the rack of ribs we ate for dinner. BUT other than that, it’s such a classy set up I can barely stand it.
I hear Jamison fiddling around in his backpack behind me. It’s happening, I think to myself over and over. I hold my breath and wait for him to tap me on the shoulders.
What do I say? I ask myself, anxious. Yes? No, that’s too boring. What took you so long? No, that sounds bitter. As I obsess over how I am going to answer arguably the biggest question in my life, I suddenly feel Jamison behind me. I’m still barely breathing.
I turn around slowly to face him. Our eyes meet and he smiles a little. I close my eyes to savor the moment and then I hear it. Not the opening of a velvet box…but the crack of a Coors Light.
“Want one?” He asks, lifting up a tall can of beer to his lips and wincing. “Oh, that’s cold.”
I am about ready to jump out the window. Want one is definitely not the question I was anticipating. I am, once again, the victim of the old classic “proposal fake out.” This is now the third time I have felt the odd and very specific burn of not being proposed to, despite all signs leading me to believe I was going to be. That’s three separate times where I prepared a surprised, yet delighted “oh, my god, me? Marry me? Well yes, of course, wow, who saw this coming?” responses to a question that never came. Three separate times I packed my outfits according to what post-engagement Instagram outfit would really pop on camera, like I was some famous influencer rather than some random girl with 300 followers.
As I stand there, recalling these three wonderful fake outs, all orchestrated by a man in a Bruins T-shirt chugging canned beer, I take a deep breath to calm my bubbling rage.
“No.” I snapped at him, holding out my hand. “I don’t want just one. I want 100.”
Don’t worry…while I was obsessing over how to accept a non-existent proposal, Jamison was relaxing in a casual fashion on a boardwalk, not a care in the world.
You see, just three months before our trip to Long Beach, I picked Jamion up at the airport after being deployed for seven straight months. I put on a new pale pink dress, some make up, and did my hair, all to look prettier than usual, but not so pretty he knew I was expecting the proposal. For some stupid reason women are supposed to be shocked or tricked into proposals, which is a weird way to start off your life long commitment to someone—by tricking or lying to them—but I don’t make the rules here. But even though the flight landed at midnight, I wanted to be dressed in clothes that were a little nicer than the clothes I typically wore at midnight when picking someone up from a late flight. Something better than BBQ stained t-shirts and running shorts.
On the drive to the airport I thought, well damn, this will make a great proposal story. Seven months apart and a tearful reunion proposal? Now that’s the type of proposal that Nicholas Sparks would write about (and then he’d give a character cancer or alzheimers, but we would just avoid that part). That’s the type of proposal other girls shank their husbands over after hearing how much better it was than theirs. And sure, yea, I wanted to like, spend the rest of my life with a man I genuinely treasured, enjoyed, and couldn’t imagine a world without. But having a story worth shanking over would have been a nice bonus.
Except when he met me at baggage claim and we had finished our tearful, tight-hugged reunion, Jamison simply got his giant duffel bag off the carousel and we…went…home? I chalked my misreading of the airport proposal up to him having other arrangements. After all, we had been dating at that point for four and a half years. Clearly he had extravagant plans, thus making an airport proposal seem like the Walmart of proposals. Sure enough, a few days into being home, Jamison threw out the idea of a trip to San Diego to go to the zoo. Our favorite city. My favorite zoo. I nearly exploded as I packed for the trip. THIS was it. THIS was the proposal he was actually planning all along. Don’t look now, I said in a fake press conference I held in my head, but this bitch is getting engaged in front of a giraffe exhibit.
This was the outfit I tried to get proposed to in in front of a pile of giraffes. I don’t recommend this outfit for such purposes, because as you can see, it didn’t work.
“Do you want to go on the aerial tram?” Jamison asked an hour into our trip at the zoo. We’d already passed the elephants, monkeys, a thousand loose birds, and the arctic foxes. All of which I thought were perfect animals to tie into a proposal speech. Like, “Our love reminds me so much of an elephant. We’ve got thick skin and communicate through vibrations” or something like that. Which is true of elephants, so google it. But the proposal, as you can imagine, hadn’t happened. But the aerial tram? A ski lift that placed us in the blue spring sky, over the entire zoo, with views of the entire city? Sign me the fuck up. THIS WAS CLEARLY HIS PLAN ALL ALONG.
“Yes, yes I want to go, let’s go.” I stammered, grabbing him by the hand and dragging him toward the line of a thousand children with runny noses and ice cream covered faces. As it turns out, the zoo tends to attract children, rather than late 20-somethings looking to secure a husband.
In the air I took mental photographs of the entire scene. Jamison with a scruffy beard with his arm around my shoulder. Balboa park full of green trees and the reds from the old brick architecture. I smoothed my hair. Straightened my back. And waited. I was absolutely certain—more certain than the time before it—that this was going to happen.
But then the tram ride was over. And all I had was a nice, beautiful memory of a wonderful time with my boyfriend, instead of a proposal. What. The. Hell. I walked off the tram, clinging to the hope that perhaps he was waiting for solid ground to go through with it. But when he said “I wish this place had people pushing beer carts around, do they really expect me to walk around an entire zoo all day without drinking?” I knew my aerial, fairy tale proposal dream had been squashed.
Just two people NOT getting engaged on an aerial tram.
Then, two months later, Jamison said we should go on yet another trip. To Long Beach. To stay in a fancy hotel on the water. And it was in that moment I knew without a single doubt, that had been his plan on where he was going to propose all along.
After three fake outs I was too burnt out to keep anticipating. I was beginning to feel the security of the world I had imagined crumbling all around me. I had spent so many years of my life with this man—moving with him for his military career, accumulating pets and experiences and laughs and hardships—that I assumed us getting married was the only path there was. It was the only path I wanted. But after watching couples get engaged all summer, each time the sting of rejection would throb inside my chest. I began to think maybe Jamison didn’t want to marry me. That maybe he was dragging his feet because he wanted out and didn’t know how to achieve that.
This is us very early in our relationship. And not to brag but, I kind of knew then that one day he’d propose to me. I just didn’t know how much he wouldn’t propose to me in the process.
One night it all came to a breaking point.
“We talk about marriage like it was a definite,” I said through heaving sobs—as I tend to get, umm, emotional when I let my anger and frustration build up after months of trying to mash them down—”why haven’t we gotten engaged yet?”
Jamison, upset as well, didn’t know how to answer.
“I don’t know why I haven’t yet. I’m sorry. I want to marry you. I do.”
I didn’t know what to do. So I left the house and stayed at a friends house for the night. After all the hard times we endured as a couple—all the times I wasn’t sure we’d come out on the other side still together—I didn’t understand how this was going to be how we ended: in a fight about forever.
Despite how hurt I was, I loved him. So I ended up doing the only thing I could do. I went back home to him. Accepted that he hadn’t proposed and that I wouldn’t know when he would. And tried to remember that not being engaged didn’t mean we loved each other any less. Our day to get engaged would come as long as we had patience and trust. I might have been wrong about the how’s and the where’s, but I was certain of that.
On July 31, 2018, Jamison and I got onto a plane at 6 a.m heading toward New Orleans. We were set to move to Biloxi, MS on our next military move and we were flying out to buy our first house.
I was dressed in my typical “I don’t want to go on this early ass flight” outfit of a sweatshirt, running shorts, and sneakers. My hair was thrown into a bun, sticking out on all sides of my head. I was cranky and my stomach hurt.
“This is the worst day of my life.” I sneered at Jamison as we settled into our seats.
“I hope not.” He said back.
I threw my hoodie on my head, laid the tray table down, and tried to sleep off my anger at being squished into a small plane after waking up at 3 a.m.
And then, out of nowhere, a voice came over the speakers.
I lifted my head up from the tray table. I stared at the scene unfolding in front of me: Jamison at the front of the plane, holding the microphone usually held by a flight attendant.
“My girlfriend and I are about to move across the country, for the third time, together…”
I felt dizzy. The entire plane turned around to look at me. My cheeks flushed red.
“Shauna, would you come up to the front of the plane with me?”
I stood slowly out of my seat.
This is where we get engaged. I thought as I walked up the aisle toward my future husband. This is what he planned all along.
Shauna Cook 
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