Engagement
The short version: Dan convinced Sara that they needed to meet his parents in the U-Store parking lot at Princeton for lunch. Instead, after a slight detour due to a poorly timed tour group, he popped the question on one knee under Blair Arch. She said yes.
The real story: Dan invited Sara’s friends Kaitlin, Ceci, and Ariadne to an after-work happy hour in New York. Ostensibly, it was because Ceci happened to be in the city for an interview and everyone else’s offices were close to each other. Despite incessant pestering from Dan and the others, Ariadne insisted she couldn’t come because she had to work. Drinks turned into dinner, as Dan used the occasion to announce his plan to propose to Sara. They eventually got Ariadne to pick up her phone (“Are you guys deaf? I said I had to work late.”) and invited her to an engagement party (“Wait, what?”).
Meanwhile, Dan had also enlisted Ceci to help him pick out a ring. As she put it, “He looked ill” when he first walked into Hamilton Jewelers. They learned more about the characteristics of diamonds and white gold bands than a normal person should know, and eventually settled on a simple round-cut setting. One morning while Sara was in the shower, Dan snuck back to the store to pick up the finished product. It remained hidden in plain sight on his desk until the day he proposed.
The night before the proposal, Dan took Sara’s parents out for drinks at the Peacock Inn to tell them about his plans (better to beg forgiveness than ask permission). Sara, of course, couldn’t know about this, either, so to mask his real plans he told Sara that he was taking the train home with their friend, Kaitlin, who just happened to be coming home for the weekend. “We had train beers,” they claimed.
That night Kaitlin and Dan’s friend Pat came to Sara and Dan’s apartment. Pat was there on the premise that he needed to learn how to use Dan’s camera “to make a million-dollar website.” After a long night of beer, laughter, and Jenga, everyone went to bed.
The next morning Sara woke up early, planning to escape the apartment to get some work done. She landed at Panera, where eventually Dan tracked her down and told her they had to go meet his parents for lunch in the U-Store parking lot, across the Princeton campus. It was an odd place for a rendez-vous, but not outside the realm of possibility. As they approached Blair Arch on their way there, though, a tour group entered, and Dan immediately took out his phone to call “mom.”
“You see the tour group? Yeah, ok, we’ll go around.” There is an easy way to get to the parking lot without going through the arch. But instead, Dan took Sara in the other direction, through Holder Courtyard, until his phone rang again. “Mom? We should come back to the lot?” So back they went. As they got to Blair Arch, Dan stopped Sara. Neither of them remembers what he said then -- but it ended with him on one knee, a ring box in his hand, and Sara saying yes.
Moments later, Pat emerged from an arch across the courtyard where he had been hidden taking photos. Pat, previously known as “Mom,” had asked the tour group to leave the arch so his friend could propose, and had ignored the advice of a passing rabbi to climb on top of a truck to get the best vantage point for photos.
They made the rounds of their parents and grandparents that afternoon, and that night Sara’s friends met them at Mediterra for the aforementioned engagement party. As Sara puts it, “he tricked me” -- she hadn’t figured anything out beforehand. As Dan puts it “I can’t believe this managed to stay a secret.” But in the end, they were in agreement: they’re getting married, August 3, 2013.
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