It was a very enjoyable Easter weekend... Meeting Lee Pletzers and his wife, getting engaged, calling all our friends and family with the good news, and catching up with people we haven't talked to in a while, and talking about / planning our engagement party and wedding.

It's been enjoyable, but boy, are there going to be some interesting times ahead!

This is my second engagement, but the first time I've actually asked someone to marry me. The first time I was engaged was with Michelle, back in 2000. She actually asked me to marry her, and then she went and bought an engagement ring the same day. I thought, at the time, that we were in love, and that she was just excited, and that she was non-traditional.

However, the truth was that she was suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder, which affected a whole lot of her judgements and attitudes. I was naive at the time, and thought that she just was extremely excited about life. How wrong I was.

Not only was I naive, I was also extremely weak and insecure. I thought that when she was having her mood swings that she was just highly emotional, and that things would get better if I just hung in there. I thought that she was needing my support, and with enough support, she'd get through all the difficulties that she was having, and things would be so much better on the other side of those difficulties.

I was wrong though. Throughout her extreme highs and her extreme lows, the more I tolerated her actions, the more she did them. The more she did them, the more I felt responsible for them. In the end, it was just a horrible situation that I was so extremely glad to be out of.

My second engagement is so much different. I've been with Deidre 15 months now. She's proven herself to be more alive to me than anyone else has been, and has become closer to me than anyone else I've ever been close to. She's been the one who has most inspired me to grow, and who has herself been inspired by me to grow. We have been growing together for over a year now, and the time was right for us to move forward with a more serious commitment to each other.

And so I asked her to marry me.

Ever since then, the really cool thing has been that Deidre has become so much happier, and felt so much more stable and secure. For me, it's like a major step has been reached and passed, and we've become a lot closer for it.

Now we're planning the engagement party and moving foward with the wedding plans too... At this stage, the engagement party is going to be in May sometime, and the wedding is probably going to be around September 2007. Because of the fact that all our family and friends are scattered across Australia and New Zealand, deciding where to have it has been the most interesting aspect of the plan. We're leaning towards New Zealand at this stage, mainly because it's easier to plan something in the place you're living. Cheaper too.

You will, of course, be updated as things move forward.

We're both pretty excited about it all, as you would probably expect. :-)