Unwifeable(90)

I let out a huge belly laugh and Pat does, too. I feel so much love for her.

“Children are here, Mom!” my sister scolds, and her kids laugh.

Pat is sitting next to me, and as everyone talks, he squeezes my leg.

“Your family is so great,” he whispers to me. I feel relaxed, at ease, like all my selves are joining together.



* * *




ONE NIGHT IN late August, when I am anxiously trying to fall asleep but unable to do so, I get a text from Pat at 2:34 in the morning.

“I just thought of the perfect day we could get married,” his text reads.

My heart stops. I reread the text. Marriage? Is he screwing with me? We have been together now for seven months. Is this possible? Is this really happening?

“Yeah?” I reply, realizing that unlike other men who might bring marriage up to mess with your mind, he is 100 percent sincere.

“February 29,” he texts again. “We’d have an anniversary every four years.”

“That’s brilliant,” I write back.

“Then it’s decided,” he replies. “We’re engaged.”

I’m shell-shocked.

“!!!!!!!” I text back.

I spring up in my bed like I’ve been hit with a bolt of lightning. I blast Jay-Z’s “On to the Next One” and dance around in circles. When I was a kid, my mom would tell me to work out my energy by running around the pool. I wish I could do that right now, but instead I screen-grab his texts and make them my home screen.

Is this really happening?

When we meet up the next day in Bryant Park, Pat greets me with an embrace and holds me tight.

“We’re going to do this properly with a ring—the exact ring that you want—and I want you to be able to plan it out just how you want it,” he says. “Because this is like the ultimate getting-flowers-at-the-office competition, right?”

I kiss him gratefully. Pat understands how fun it can be to spike the ball.

“I want a ruby ring,” I say.

He touches my face gently.

“You do?” he asks.

The ruby ring has a particular sentimentality for us. When we first shared all our stories, Pat told me once about his grandma’s ring, which featured all of her grandkids’ birthstones.

As a little boy, four or five years old, he would touch the ruby stone and say, “That’s me!”

I want him to be able to do the same with mine.

“And we can do the public proposal on the steps of Times Square . . . and we can Periscope the whole thing so our friends and family can watch,” I say, on a roll now, so excited at the opportunity to go sky’s-the-limit.

“That sounds great,” he says.

On the day of the event, we wake up at 5 a.m., and I pick up a copy of the Daily News, which shows a picture of us in the top left corner.

“Tune in, see her yes face!” the headline reads, telling people to watch us Periscope the proposal later that day. It is like something out of a million vision boards I would never dare create.

“Mandy,” Pat says as a crowd watches on the red TKTS steps of Times Square and another one watches online, “I’ve been smitten with you since before we met for our first date. I couldn’t understand how you could still be single. We met on a stunt date over coffee. You told me stories. A lot of them involving sex. You mentioned how many dicks you sucked. It was magical. After our first date, I was still smitten, but I could kind of understand the still-single part.”

I am crying-laughing.

“Mandy, in all seriousness you’re the smartest person I’ve ever met. You’re the sweetest person I’ve ever met. You’re the funniest woman I’ve ever met. You’re the person on earth I always want to see the most. I’m still smitten. And I know the reason you were still single is because I hadn’t gotten to meet you yet. Because you have the patience and the generosity and the kindness to love someone who is as deeply flawed as I am. So, Mandy . . . will you be my best friend and wife forever?”

I say, “Yes,” as I stand there in tears. He puts the ring on my finger and we kiss like it’s the first time we ever have, like it’s our last night on earth.

I get engaged on October 23, 2015—the very last day of my thirties. I wake up on my fortieth birthday, engaged to the love of my life and unable to believe that I have not only met the man of my dreams, but that I get to spend the rest of my life with him—starting very soon.

As we start to figure out the details, Pat has an idea for how we might do our wedding that he thinks might make the night even more special than just resulting in a marriage anniversary every four years.

“What would you say about getting married,” Pat asks, “while performing onstage?”

Nothing has ever sounded so brilliant, honestly. I love nothing more than joining Pat when he performs, and this seems like the ultimate way to tie the knot.

“Are you kidding me?” I respond. “Yes!”

Pat tells me how the wedding will work. Because his stage show has been accepted into the New York Comedy Festival, he’s headlining Gotham Comedy Club on November 11, so we can turn it into the festival’s very first wedding-slash-comedy show. Awesome.

But the date is coming up really, really soon, and it’s not long before we are both running overheated as we scramble to meet the fast-approaching event. It feels like a 24-style countdown to bring all the pieces together: the minister (check), the performers (check), the vows (check), the rings (check).