The Bumpy Road to Married Bliss

HarperTrueLove

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First published by HarperTrueLove 2014

FIRST EDITION

© Chris Dicken and Donny Wong 2014

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Source ISBN: 9780008105143

Ebook Edition © November 2014 ISBN: 9780008100179

Version: 2014-10-31

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Chapter 1: To Begin at the Beginning

Chapter 2: Something Changed

Chapter 3: Hiking Back to Happiness

Chapter 4: From California to Clerkenwell

Chapter 5: A New Tradition

Chapter 6: No Child Left Behind

Chapter 7: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Chapter 8: Keeping it in the Family

Chapter 9: A Movable Feast

Chapter 10: Days and Confused

Chapter 11: Moving in from the Outside

Chapter 12: The Elephant in the Room

Chapter 13: Yay! We’re Not Related!

Chapter 14: Everyone Loves a Bargain

Chapter 15: A Happier New Year?

Chapter 16: In-Laws and Outlaws

Chapter 17: To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate?

Chapter 18: Trying to Get Decent Reception

Chapter 19: Life Can Be a Drag

Chapter 20: Faith and Frustration

Chapter 21: Cycling Out of the Closet

Chapter 22: Bored of the Rings?

Chapter 23: What to Wear?

Chapter 24: Good News from Across the Pond

Chapter 25: Guest Concerns and Guest Stars

Chapter 26: Start the Countdown

Chapter 27: The Joy of Practicalities

Chapter 28: Work, Work, Work

Chapter 29: Searching for a Connection

Chapter 30: Potential Disaster

Chapter 31: A Solution from Vietnam

Chapter 32: It’s the Week of the Wedding!

Chapter 33: Freak Out!

Chapter 34: A Timely Reminder

Chapter 35: Let’s Get this Party Started

Chapter 36: An Unforgettable Day

Chapter 37: Lost and Found (Two Months Later)

Chapter 38: What a Difference a Year Makes

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Preface

Something amazing has just happened! Donny proposed! We’re getting married! No dates or plans yet, but we just wanted to share the news. Chris x

– From a text message sent to Chris’s parents, Sunday, 13 November 2011

To Begin at the Beginning

Chris – 29 November 2011

As we start to tell people our news, we can’t help but notice that all our male friends tend towards giving us hearty hugs and offers of congratulations, but our female friends tend to squeal and immediately demand details about how we got engaged. So in order to satisfy the requirement for details, here they are:

I never thought in a million years that Donny would ever propose. I’ve always been the sentimental one in our relationship, who was keen on the idea of marriage. But whenever I mentioned the idea to Donny in the past he would just pull a face and accuse me of wanting to be a bridezilla. We’ve been together for almost four years now, and have been living together in London for the last one of those years, and I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that this was how it was going to be. We were a committed part of each other’s lives, but there wouldn’t be any kind of public ceremony or legal commitment. And I had become OK with that.

But there we were on holiday in Thailand, when something amazing happened. We were outside our little hut, on a balcony with a view through the jungle and out to the sea, above which the moon had just started to rise. We had just finished off the last of a bottle of scotch we had with us (I hasten to point out this was now the fourth night there) and I was just thinking about turning in when BAM! – Donny gets down on one knee and asks me to marry him. As you can imagine, my answer was a massive yes!

You see, growing up I was convinced it was my destiny to never marry anyone.

I never went out with anyone as a kid or a teenager. In fact, I didn’t even kiss anyone until I was well into my twenties. I could never properly face up to the fact that I was gay, so I simply ignored the romantic part of me and focussed on spending time with friends and trying to avoid the bullies in my school who would pick on any kid that was a bit ‘different’ – which would often mean I became their target for the day.

The added complication with all this was that I grew up as part of a tight Christian community, which meant I firmly believed that fancying men would lead to a one-way trip to hell. I hated the fact that I was gay, hated myself that I wasn’t strong enough to change how I felt, and I was terrified that people would find out the truth and cast me out of the church and the community. This was my secret problem, my sin, and I earnestly hoped and prayed nearly every day of my life that it would be taken away from me. But, of course, because it was an intrinsic part of me (albeit a part that I hadn’t yet come to embrace), I was never able to pray the gay away.

Looking back now, I realise how lonely I was during my teenage and young adult years. I had lots of friends and acquaintances, but I was too scared to ever open up and tell anyone my secret. I was convinced that being a good Christian meant that I was destined for a life of celibacy and bachelorhood, since the alternative would be to sin – and therefore I would never find true love. But I also believed that God was watching over me and wanted me to be happy – so would He really want me to live a life of loneliness?

That all began to change in my mid-twenties when I finally took the decision to come out and start seeing being gay as part of who I was, rather than as a terrible affliction I needed to hide away. I began to accept myself, and made lots of friends through gay Christian support groups. I even started learning the language of romance for the first time. When I was in my late twenties, I met this wonderful guy and fell head over heels in love. Because he was my first boyfriend, I was convinced that this was the person for me, and we were destined to be together for ever. Sadly, he didn’t feel the same way and ended our relationship. He said he wanted to become an Anglican vicar, and informed me that I was standing in the way of him fulfilling his ambition. (Never mind that, six months later, I found out he was dating someone else … but that’s another story.)

I met Donny a couple of years after that, but I’ll save that happier story for later.

Right now, it’s time to get back up to date, and to Donny’s proposal. What happened next? Actually, I remember very clearly what was going through my head at the time: ‘When do we tell people? When should we have the wedding? What sort of event do we want to organise?’

I was practically picking out table centrepieces already!

You see, I’ve never been very good at focussing on the present – I guess you can call me a chronic daydreamer. But back then I had to stop fretting about the future and just get on with enjoying the rest of our holiday, and to treasure the fact that we were engaged.

But now that we’re back in London, it’s time for the wedding planning to begin!

Something Changed

Donny – 30 November 2011

OK, so I gave in to the whole marriage thing. And happily, I might add.

Although Chris had professed many times early in our relationship how important it was for him to get married one day, I never saw marriage as something I needed in order to feel fulfilled in life. In fact, I was always vehemently anti-marriage (for both gay and straight people), and thought it was nothing more than feeding into an exploitative wedding industry – a relic of a time when marriage was a business deal between families, when women were considered to be property. Also, I’ve always prided myself in being an independent thinker, and to me there was nothing worse than to follow a crowd and do things just because everyone else was doing it, or because it was expected of me by my family or society. Also, with so many stories out there of people spending tens of thousands of pounds for what amounts to just a big party, at the end of the day, I felt the money would be better spent as a down payment for a house. And lastly, having previously been in a long-term 14-year relationship that ended badly, I knew only too well about the statistics showing that over half of all marriages end in divorce.

So what changed?

It all started at the wedding of one of Chris’s cousins last summer. The bride and groom cornered me at some point to ask whether Chris and I were going to be the next ones to get married. I responded with my normal thoughts about weddings and marriage (but I did it tactfully, since I was talking to a couple who had just tied the knot!). But it did start me thinking, why not?

And that one thought kept growing and growing in my head. Last month I had to go to Boston on the east coast of the US for work, and I also had a side trip to California planned to visit my family. I came very close to telling my friends in Boston that I was going to propose to Chris – but I didn’t do it. I chickened out. I hadn’t yet convinced myself that it was something I was definitely going to do, and I didn’t want to commit to it until I knew that I was fully ready.

These thoughts and feelings intensified even further the next week, when I got to San Francisco, where if I was going to make the announcement to my family, I would have had the extra challenge of needing to gain their approval and acceptance of our relationship. I’ll write more about my family a bit later, but I’ll just state at this point that they are a fairly traditional Chinese-American family, and that my brother and his family were also born-again evangelical Christians, so there were quite a few challenges to gaining everyone’s full acceptance.

Now, bear in mind, despite my personal views on marriage, at this point in my life I was also no stranger to being engaged. I was previously in a 14-year relationship when I was living in the US, and my ex had proposed to me after civil partnerships were legalised in the state of Massachusetts, where we were living. But it was a long engagement and we broke up before we even got around to setting a date. And another guy I dated for seven months in London before I got together with Chris had actually got down on one knee and proposed to me when we were just four months into the relationship! I must have made an impression on him, but I had to squash his aspirations since really we were still in the beginning phases of getting to know one another. (In contrast, my ex in the US didn’t propose until we had already been together for over 10 years.)

So, marriage was not something that I took lightly, and hence there was a lot of anxiety about whether or not it was a step I wanted to take.

But countering all of this anxiety was also the knowledge that getting married was still something very important to Chris, and the realisation that Chris was the best thing that had happened to me so far in my life. Therefore proposing to Chris was not only something that I wanted to do, but the more I got to know Chris, something that I felt like I had to do.

And so, underneath the light of the full moon while we were on holiday on an island off the coast of Thailand, I got down on one knee and spoke the words that would set us off on yet another journey.

Hiking Back to Happiness

Chris – 1 December 2011

Not much wedding planning has happened yet so, as promised, here’s the story of how this adventure with Donny started.

I met Donny on a gay hiking trip on the Isle of Wight. From the first moment I laid eyes on him I knew he was special. There were two things that initially attracted me to him. The first was his wide, winning smile and the second was his dry, subversive sense of humour, which was always accompanied by a deliciously dirty chuckle. During the first evening of party games, I couldn’t take my eyes off him and hoped that the following two days of walking would give us a chance to spend some time together.

And spend time together we did. In fact, for the first day we spent almost the entire hike chatting together and learning about each other. Sadly, one of the things I learned was that he was going out with someone else. Worse yet, his boyfriend was a high-flying CEO of a software company, and there was no way I was going to be able to compete against that. So I told myself, ‘Oh well, at least I’ve made a new friend.’

The week after the hike I was due to fly to the US on business, so I took the opportunity to drop Donny a message to find out if he wanted me to bring him back anything from his home country. I was expecting just a two- or three-line email in return, but much to my surprise I received a long and involved message detailing all the interesting local foods I should try in the area of the US I was visiting. This initial communication led to an ongoing series of fun (and somewhat flirty) messages back and forth, and also a few social get-togethers in London, which we now refer to as our ‘faux-dates’. He was still seeing this other person at the time, but this didn’t stop us having a great time together and getting to know each other better – but strictly as friends, of course.

It wasn’t until about five months after we met that I invited him down to my house for dinner and an evening of video games. It was about 10 minutes after Donny arrived that he dropped the bombshell that he had broken up with his CEO boyfriend two days earlier. I was dumbstruck! Could this finally be my chance for some new romance? After establishing that he was doing OK, I innocently asked him, ‘So what do you think is a socially acceptable amount of time to wait before I ask you out?’ He then flashed me his megawatt smile and answered cheekily, ‘Oh, I reckon about two days.’

That visit was the start of a four-year journey of discovering more about each other, of falling more in love and embarking on many adventures. What I didn’t think would ever happen, however, was that we would get married. From a very early point in our relationship, Donny had made it clear that he felt marriage was nothing more than a piece of paper and an outdated patriarchal institution. Although I was sad about that, I wasn’t so desperate to be married that I would leave Donny to try to find someone who did prioritise marriage. I felt I was onto a winner – Donny was the best person I had ever met and I just wanted to be with him. Married or not.

And now we are going to get married, I can’t believe it!

From California to Clerkenwell

Donny – 2 December 2011

I thought I would add in my piece about how Chris and I got together, so that you can hear both sides of the story.

As an American living in London, one of the most common questions I have been asked during the past eight years is, ‘How did you end up in the UK in the first place?’

And as with most things there is always a short answer – that work brought me over on a secondment – and a long answer – which was always best left for a second date, or an evening with friends and wine. Lots of wine.

And it was the long version that I decided to share with Chris while we hiked together on the Isle of Wight, because something told me he was someone that I could trust (even though it wasn’t a date!) and that this was someone I needed to share with, even though we had just met.

And because we’re all friends here, I’ll share the longer version with you too.

I grew up in California within the city of San Francisco, which I still think of as home, since my family are all there. But I left home and went to college in Boston on the east coast of the US when I was 17, intending to go for just four years and then return to San Francisco (because Californians and east coast winters don’t typically mix). And those four years turned into fifteen in the blink of an eye … all because of a guy I met during the summer just before my second year of college.

Growing up I never fully realised or accepted that I was gay, and I always thought I was just going through a phase. Only the phase never ended, and I found myself increasingly thinking about guys and having crushes on male classmates. So that summer I was determined to meet someone, in part to figure out once and for all if I really liked guys or not. These were early days for the Internet and there was barely even email, so I posted something on an Internet bulletin board and soon had a date lined up with someone I’ll describe as the Tall Handsome Swimmer (I’ll refer to him as THS).

From that first kiss I shared with THS at the end of our date, I was hooked. I was 18 and in love, and I very quickly found myself in a relationship with THS that ultimately lasted 14 years before it ran its natural course. All my ‘growing-up’ years were with THS, and although there was a lot of love shared during those years, there was also much heartbreak at the end. And so I volunteered at work for the transfer to London in order to get a fresh start, not ever thinking I would be in another relationship again anytime soon, and not at all thinking that I would ever find love again like the love I shared with THS.

I came to London not knowing a soul – having left behind a tight circle of close friends in Boston and two cats that I shared with THS – carrying just two suitcases and what felt like a lifetime of memories stored in my heavy heart. And slowly, with the newfound freedom that comes with being young, single and carefree in a new city, I slowly rebuilt my life.

So I was in an interesting state just before I met Chris. I had been in the UK for less than a year, and after a period of single life and casual dating, had found myself in another relationship – this time with a neurotic workaholic I’ll refer to as the CEO. I never thought I would find love again like the love I had shared with THS, and at some level I stopped looking for that type of love, or even caring whether or not I would ever find it. So this casual relationship with the CEO was enough for me, and because I wasn’t looking for (and certainly wasn’t ready for) any kind of deeper commitment, the CEO ticked the boxes for what I needed and for what I was emotionally ready to face at that time. And marriage itself was the furthest thing from my mind, since I had become very cynical, convinced that every relationship would ultimately end horribly anyway.

So yes, I was a bit damaged, and what I really needed when I met Chris was a friend more than anything else. And that’s exactly how Chris and I had our start during that hiking weekend on the Isle of Wight.

The years since the day that Chris and I first got together as a couple flew by, just as the years flew by when I was in my first relationship with THS. That’s when you know you’re in a good place – it’s like when you’re watching a good movie: you become so engrossed in what you are seeing on the screen that you become oblivious to time.

We had a bit of a commuter relationship in the beginning, because Chris lived down in Surrey, to the south of London, and I lived in Clerkenwell, near the city centre. It took over 90 minutes to get from my door to his, so we pretty much only saw each other on weekends for the first few years of our relationship.

Chris and I have a lot of happy memories from this time. Even early on, I knew there was something special about Chris and that I was on to a winner. In fact, during one of our earliest dates, when we had only been together for a month or so, I surprised Chris by inviting him to accompany me on a business trip to Japan that I was planning for the summer. Mind you, this was March and we were just a few weeks into our relationship, and the trip wasn’t going to happen until July at the earliest. And although we had just started dating, I already knew then that the relationship would last at least through the summer, and that he was someone I wanted to have at my side to explore Shinto shrines and climb Mount Fuji under the light of the full moon.

Other highlights and adventures during this time included trips to California to meet my family, and to explore the natural beauty of places like Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. On one trip that coincided with Chris’s birthday, we visited San Diego and I surprised him with a special tour of the San Diego Zoo, where we got to sit with flamingos, feed a rhinoceros and pet a kangaroo.

But the major turning point in the relationship was when I purchased a small flat in the borough of Islington in north London. This was a bold move for me, and it was a sign that I was taking positive steps towards establishing my own roots in London. But Chris wasn’t prepared to move in with me yet and, perhaps wisely, he wanted to take things a bit more slowly. This was the autumn of 2009, and we had only been together for 18 months, so I could understand his hesitancy.

It wasn’t until a year later that Chris finally took the plunge and moved in with me, and that was probably the biggest life-changing event for us both. Moving in together is the step where a life for one becomes a life for two, and every step you take from then on needs to have the couple’s best interests in mind. Also, this is when a couple needs to address more grown-up and unglamorous, but necessary, practical issues, such as paying the mortgage, figuring out a cleaning rota, and money for groceries and utilities. This was a much bigger change for Chris, since he had only ever lived with housemates before. But for me, it took me back to familiar ground, since I have spent more of my adult years in a relationship than being outside of one. Nevertheless, it is a defining moment in the evolution of any relationship, when you transition from being boyfriends to becoming partners.