I came home one night from a long bike ride and Evin was on the phone, I presumed, with her mother.  She was pacing around the apartment while talking but Evin always paces around the apartment while talking on the phone. So I went about my business, blissfully unaware of what they were talking about. When she hung up the phone I was in the kitchen at the far other end of the apartment.

“How’s your Mom?” I yelled.

“She’s good.  She hosted her Gourmet Club last night. And she’s going to Fire Island this weekend,” she yelled back.

“That’s nice.”

“Oh,” Evin added now unseen in the bedroom, “and she asked us if we had set a date yet.”

When I heard this I dropped whatever I was doing and rushed through the apartment all the way towards her.

“…she thinks that we should really do that now because…”

And when I reached Evin, I did the wildly clever “change of subject” tactic which had worked so successfully over the last 11 days: I took her hand, pulled her closer to me, and was just about to tell her I loved her when she stopped me with her index finger and said:

“Nice try. But I’m onto your little trick and I’ve been humoring you by letting you do it but we need to start planning this wedding.”

Suddenly, everything went black. I started to get dizzy. I grabbed a chair to steady myself but Evin ignored me—

“We need to set a date, we need to find a place, we need to put together a guest list, we need to…”

And she just kept going on and on rattling off what needed to be done as I stood there unable or incapable of saying anything. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be married to her. I couldn’t wait to be married to her. But wedding plans scared me. Full disclosure: I was married once before. It was brief, I was heavily medicated much of the time, it ended without the need for law enforcement, and we parted if not friends, then not enemies, either. I wanted this go around to be different. I wanted not quite the wedding extravaganza my ex and I had had. Evin knew this and was understanding about my desire.

“Just because you had a bad first marriage experience doesn’t mean I have to suffer.”

And she was right! It was wrong for me to deprive her of a wedding. So I half-reluctantly agreed that we could start planning the wedding.

“Tomorrow? Can we start tomorrow?”

“Yes,” she said tossing me a bone, “We can start tomorrow.”