Getting Married

In reality, a lot of time has passed between some of these posts, but events and my inspiration to write them down don’t always coincide. For those of you have haven’t heard, I’m getting married!

Granted, I have many more thoughts on dating than marriage. However, from what I’ve seen so far, I guess I could summarize it all in the American Pie films. That’s honestly the best example of how that part of life works out for most people–Lots of moments that are:

• tender
• anxious
• inappropriate for children
• funny in retrospect

My fiancee was born in Canada and grew up in the U.S., but her parents are from India. I’ve gotten to the point in my life where I believe that stereotypes are more curious entities that offer insight rather than something inherently bad that should be stomped out of existence, so I can proudly say that most of the Indian stereotypes are pretty much true. They’re all pretty positive stereotypes, anyway, so I don’t see the harm.

Basically, the Indian marriage system in the western world can be easily modeled in a state machine.


I used to use LaTEX to model all my state machines, but it was too much of a pain to maintain.

So far, I have two cologne and shaving kits, two pairs of pants, five shirts, and a variety of other things.

If I wanted to make the state machine more complete, I’d need to build an impatience level into the loop, and I hate drawing graphs by hand too much to do that. Anyway, eventually, something like this will happen.

Thanksgiving weekend…

[fiancee's mom] So, when are you going to get married, or at least engaged?

[me] Ummmm…

[fiancee's mom] Well, when are you going to tell us when you are going to get married or get engaged?

[me] Soon.

[fiancee's mom]That is not a good answer!

[me] Well, in America, we take things much more slowly.

[fiancee's mom] That is too slow! That is not good!

Of course I’m being too hard on my future mother-in-law. When people ask how I proposed, and I reference the “Where’s the money, Lebowski?” scene, I always tell them that I am just kidding. It was an interesting moment, because even though I was probably not getting of of my fiancee’s family’s house alive without some sort of commitment, I knew it was what I wanted as well, so there was really no reason to feel pressured.

My fiancee and I then retreated to her cousin’s office/computer room. It took us about forty-five minutes to talk everything through and decide, mother or not, that we really did want to get married. It would have been quicker, but her nine-year-old cousin kept busting into the room over and over again because he wanted to watch videos on YouTube. It was hardly the romantic walk on the beach proposal we’ve learned from movies and television from the last few decades, (the pie movies perhaps being an exception), but I wouldn’t trade this memory for any of that.