It was less than 48 hours after the proposal that the binder had already been constructed. I didn’t even really mean to see it, but as I was clearing off our cluttered counter I spotted the pink three-ring binder tucked away under some papers. At first I thought it may have been a work file, but the pale pink seemed an odd choice for a professional folio. I picked it up to examine the meaning of all this.
There was no cover (there would be one later), no binder label (that too) and no indication from the outside what it was for at all. When I opened to the first page and saw a list of links to every wedding website imaginable, I finally realized what I was holding. My fiancée is an incredibly well-organized person, but even for her this was a quick turnaround. My only explanation was that she’d been lying in wait; there had to be a secret cache of magazine clipouts, Internet printouts, and pricing lists that she’d constructed over the previous months. As it turns out, she had compiled all of this over the now 48 hour life of our engagement. The ideas, she said, had been stewing in her head since she was a little girl.