Originally posted 06.10.2005

It is with great joy that I announce the engagement of my brother, Ethan, to his wonderful girlfriend of three-plus years, Annie.

We worried about him a bit. About him missing the boat here, dragging his feet too long. The fear of commitment, blah, blah, blah. Though with some of his girlfriends, that was probably a good thing. But with Annie, well, geez. They just make sense together. Complement each other in ways that seem ideal to me. What a happy couple looks like. Thing is, he’d been around the block enough times to know what a healthy relationship doesn’t look like; I worried that he was putting his fears in front of his reality.

But it seems my little brother’s grown up a lot in the last year. Maybe overcome some fairly deeply rooted anxieties about marriage (our parents’ union was rather difficult to witness), and the trepidation a lot of young men seem predisposed to when it comes to serious relationships, to be able to see the truth of what he has with Annie. He proposed to her while they were vacationing in Italy. “The Tuscan hills do things to you,” he said. Neither of them were expecting a proposal just then, but the time, it turned out, was right.

From how he describes it, it sounds more like they’re engaged to be engaged. They’re not going to spend the next year planning a wedding, but discussing what it means to be moving in that direction. I think it’s a wise plan, a mature approach. I think they have a fine romance, within which they will find an even finer love.

You know what I’m talking about. The roots that hold the tree through all seasons, long after the buds of spring have dropped and blown away in winter’s wind. What holds tight through the storms, and has faith in the eminence of renewal.

So Ethan, if you’re reading this, here’s my favorite Shakespeare sonnet. Sort of sums it up.

#116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken,
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.