Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

So, we’d been together for ten years, and we were going through kind of a— we’d been going through this kind of rough patch, and it was a little bit about like “are we gonna do this forever; what’s gonna happen,” and she was opposed to the idea of the institution of marriage because gay people couldn’t get married, and it’s kind of a fucked up thing anyway, and I wasn’t— but I wanted, I wanted to do it. It was somehow important to me, and— um— I really didn’t know what she thought about it, and we had this weird thing where we really didn’t talk about it— um— but I thought it was a crossroads, like, we’re either gonna do this or we’re gonna not and we’re gonna move on.
And so, I was working on a movie that was shooting on an island off the coast of Maine, and I was there for like three months, and I found this little jewelry making shop, and the guy— there’s three guys that work there, but one of them had just died so his bench was open. And they let me come in and work at this jewelry making bench, and I spent like a month— I didn’t— I’d never made any jewelry before, so I didn’t know what I was doing, and it took me a really long time. It took me about a month to make this ring, and— uh, and I did. It was gold. I carved the wax, and I cast the gold and set the stone. And I had built— I had made a little wooden ring box a couple years before that I still had with me ‘cause I’d been thinking about it for a long time.

So, anyway, she— uh— she comes out for our ten year anniversary, and she gets there. I have this elaborate picnic out on the pointe. I— uh [chokes up and laughs at himself] I don’t know what happened to me. I need more sleep.

Um, so I got down on bended knee. I said, you know, “We’ve been together for ten years, do wanna get married?”

And she said, “Ten years?… No, we’ve been together for nine.”

And I’m like, “No, no, it’s ten… Is that a yes?”

And she sort of looks at me incredulously and says, “I guess so.”

It was really deflating and totally unsatisfying, but she took the ring, and she put it on, and then I actually had to go shoot that day, and I came back to the inn where we were staying, and— uh— we crawled into bed together, and she was sort of squirming under the sheets really excited.

[audience laughs] Come on, people, this is a sweet story.

And she— uh— she slipped a ring on my finger, and I was like, oh that’s so sweet, while I shooting she had gone out and she had gotten a ring for me, and— uh— it turns out, in fact, she had stayed up after I had gone the sleep the night before, and after I fell asleep she had sized my finger and called back to the jewelry—

[starts tearing up again] This is pathetic. This was ten years ago too, so I’ve had time to deal with it.

She had called back to the jewelry making shop in Santa Monica where she had been making me a ring. and I beat her to the punch by— by one day, so she was likearrghh. But she had made this ring that had— which I’ve now lost— but she made this ring that had nine holes, one for each year that we’d been together. So when she found out that it was actually ten, she was like, ohh no.

Now I see why we’re not supposed to do those stories. I get it now