The Proposal

Well, during the first night of Skepticon 5, JT proposed on stage at the end of his talk. Apparently, I was the only one in the room that didn't know what was happening.

Now, before you ask, we did talk about this beforehand. Once he got it out of me that I would say yes if he seriously asked, he started making plans.

JT's talk was entitled Dear Christian 2 in which he presented several common arguments that theists often posit when trying to convince atheists that god is real, and then he explained why those arguments don't work.

The final argument he presented was, "But how can you love without god?"

...Yes. His proposal to me was a part of an argument against the existence of god. Most atheist-y proposal ever.

So he reaches this slide and starts off by talking about how love is like any other emotion: it starts as a chemical reaction in your brain, and the evidence is the way we show and express that love. Then a photo of me and JT pops up on the projector screen, and our friend, Steven Olsen, sitting next to me (who contributes to JT's blog) handed me a rose from under his jacket. I was a little confused at first. A slideshow of photos of us together started going. Then I saw a whole line of people (those people being good friends and a lot of them were there to give talks at the conference) forming to each hand me a rose as JT continued with his well-rehearsed speech about displaying love and showing how you care and relating it to our relationship. My mom said she thinks I made it to the second rose before I started crying.

I sincerely wish I could tell you what JT said to me, but his speech was so well-rehearsed and well-written that I would butcher it if I tried. And to be honest, I didn't hear a lot of it between the tears and roses and hugs.

His speech ended when I had a dozen roses in hand and he said, "This woman gives me more access to heaven than any belief about god ever did…and I want to spend my life with you. Will you marry me?”

I would like to tell you I played it cool, but there's video of this, so I can't say that... I can tell you, I couldn't say anything, so I nodded vigorously and jumped up to get to the stage.

All of Skepticon was recorded and will be on youtube in the near future, so I'll be sure to post that for you.

PS! There won't be a wedding for a couple years. I'm going to finish up my bachelor degree first and get into grad school, and then we'll take it from there.