If you want another story, when I was a four year old girl, I asked my mother how my dad proposed to her, looking for a fairytale. She told me they’d been together for eight years, so “at that point it was really shit or get off the pot.” This was probably the first time she swore in front of me, and she only did it a dozen times or so ever (though I was twelve when she died, so she was still editing herself).

My dad also separately started hitting a silver quarter with a spoon on the night after their first date, and hit it so many thousands of times over the next several years that he was able to shape it into a ring for her, which is one of the most romantic things I’ve ever heard, but that wasn’t a proposal, so she didn’t tell me that story for several years.