She said, "You're kidding, right?"

Not because she didn't say yes (which she eventually did), but because she wasn't expecting it at all. Charity loves being surprised, but pulling off a surprise proposal took a bit of work and a little bit of misdirection.

When Charity moved out to Philly, the understanding was that as long as things proceeded as we were expecting, a proposal would come before Christmas. Being a student, there's a limitation on when we can get married. Summer and Winter breaks are really the only time. To get married this summer, we needed to do a little bit of planning when we returned to Wisconsin for Christmas. So already Charity had some notion of when it was coming. After all, we hadn't broken up, and that meant an engagement was coming.

I ordered the ring in the beginning of November and got it a few days later. I was pretty sure Charity didn't know. But just to be sure, I enlisted the help of Joy, her sister. We got engaged on Nov. 15, so the Thursday before, I texted Joy. "Wanna help me surprise Charity?" She called me back right away. I told her my plans, and asked her to tell Charity that I had ordered the ring that day (and was getting the next week). Meanwhile, all week long, whenever Charity asked what my plans for Thursday were, I was especially evasive.

"I need to run errands."
"Yeah? What errands?"
"I dunno, go to the bank, other stuff, not sure, bunch of stuff."

So Charity thought I had done something suspicious that Thursday. The truth is, I sat home and studied mostly. When Saturday came, she knew I'd be proposing soon, but not for a few days still.

So Saturday morning I picked Charity up. We had planned to take a nice, relaxing day off. We went to the mall. Then we went to a movie. Then we went out to eat at the Cheesecake Factory. This was the part that made me nervous. Cheesecake Factory had kinda become our place. When we first met up, it was our first real 'date'. After 6 months, we happened to be together again, and went to Cheesecake Factory. Somehow, though, she thought nothing of the fact that I wanted to go to Cheesecake Factory. (Probably because I made her pay!)

We were stuffed, and got our cheesecake to go. Brought it back to my house where we started a fire and put a blanket down in front of it. There we sat, drinking coffee and eating cheesecake in front of the fire in our future home. When we were done with the cheesecake, we cuddled and talked. I worked the conversation over to how much I was looking forward to the rest of our life together...

...which led to me asking her to marry me. I nervously fumbled with the ring box, and she was convinced I was just trying to freak her out and fool her. So when I asked, "Charity, will you marry me?", her first response was "You're kidding, right?"

I finally got the ring box open, and asked again. This time she said yes :)