The Greatest Moment of My Life

Today’s Question of the Day on Pointless overthinking is about the greatest moment of our life so far. I already briefly shared it in the comments, but I want to expand on my answer.

The greatest moment of my life so far is the moment my now husband proposed to me. This was June 4, 2010. I was 23-years-old and struggling with the aftermath of a traumatic childhood unfolding itself to me. My dissociative symptoms had become too unbearable to hide and I was slowly beginning to trust my staff at the psychiatric hospital resocialization unit with my feelings. That day, my named nurse invited my then still boyfriend into a room with me and her to explain some of my symptoms.

After that, my boyfriend took me to the place we had first met each other on September 19, 2007. It was a bus stop near the university’s dentistry department that I’d gotten off the bus from my home that day in 2007. Now, they were working on the road there, so we couldn’t sit at the bus stop. Instead, we sat down in the grass and my boyfriend proposed to me. I at first thought he was joking so I replied: “So you think that’s cool then?” He said yes and went on to propose we get married on September 19, 2011. “Mind getting married on a Monday?”

We chose our wedding date based on the fact that it was exactly four years since we first met. Four, for us, is a code word for kissing, because of a kind of wordplay in Dutch.

A week later, my boyfriend asked whether I’d informed my parents yet that we were getting married. I hadn’t, still thinking he had been joking. As such, I never said an official “Yes” to his proposal. That must’ve felt terribly hurtful to him. I told my parents, sister and grandma that evening.

My family’s responses were not overly supportive. My sister said we were a bit young (I would be 25 and my husband 22). My parents said we should go live together first. This is not a requirement for married couples anymore here in the Netherlands. We wanted to marry each other for no other reason than to prove our love. My parents felt, as did some of my professionals, including the psychologist who kicked me out of the hospital to live with my husband, that love didn’t mean much if you don’t live together as a couple. Fine by me, you’re entitled to your opinion, but we’re entitled to ours.