Throw a few back and get married.

The other night, my hubby and I got on the topic of our engagement, and how he asked my father for his baby child's hand in marriage. He claimed that he and my father went in the bar, and after two vodka gimlets, a couple of shots, and a beer, that he agreed to let him marry me.

Yeah, right.

More likely the dh was the one throwing 'em back. Heck, I would've, if I'd been marrying me. The poor man had proposed something like six times by then, and I always either laughed at him, or told him no. He first proposed a few weeks after we met. No way, Jose -- I told him he was crazy, cause I didn't even know him.

Months later, he mentioned that one local restaurant was "our" place. When I asked him why, he said it was because it was the first place that he had proposed to me where I had said maybe. Well, ya gotta give the guy hope, I guess. I just figured that no one could live with me for any period of time, so I didn't want to put him through that.

That crazy man didn't give up. Kept at it, every chance he got, but I kept hedging. Then one night, we went down to the neighbors' for drinks. Hubby was lamenting that my parents were coming to visit (we lived in Florida) and that they wouldn't stay with us, because we were living together without benefit of matrimony. Our neighbor, who was in his 70s, said, in all of his wisdom, "well, she is their baby, and they are trying to watch out for her."

Hubby said that fatal statement. Something you do NOT want to say when the girlfriend has had, for the first time in her life, a couple of the neighbor's whiskey sours: "well, it's not like I'm not going to marry her."

"Oh yeah," says my half sotted self. "Hey Jeanne, get me a calendar." She did, and I proceeded to toss onto his lap saying, "pick a date."

And he did.

I went upstairs and fell asleep on the couch. Woke up a couple of hours later thinking "did I really do what I think I just did?" Then I realized that there were roses and a card on the table in front of me.

Yep, I did.

A year and a half later, we got married, in a wedding that could've made a full hour on Oprah (see the archive post "Save it for Oprah.)

I never had one of the neighbor's whiskey sours again.