It was the worst marriage proposal EVER.

But it worked

“No good deed goes unpunished.” This was the thought careening through my mind as my beloved 1968 Mustang was careening through an intersection, being bulldozed from behind by a car full of drunken frat boys who entirely failed to see my car at the stop sign — the sign I had never previously been bothered to stop for — as they sped down a residential street at what felt, to me, like an extravagant level of speed.

I hadn’t wanted to go to the party that Saturday night. I wanted to be virtuous and do Monday’s homework and then sleep through all of Sunday. So I had dropped my friends at the party and headed back to my dorm room; only to be struck by Fuck Beta Idiots.

I jumped out of the car to inspect the Mustang: a dent in the bumper the size of a cantelope; this was unacceptable. I whirled around swinging, punching Biff (I assume his name was Biff) in the face, screaming, “You dented my CAR!!!” in a voice that I hoped demonstrated the appropriate level of unacceptability. When the cops arrived, he whined about that punch (“She assaulted me!), but it was 1985 and Texas and they weren’t having his wussy nonsense. Instead, they kindly asked me if I was injured and did I want to go to the hospital? I declined.

The next morning I awoke to a nasty case of whiplash that morphed over the next few weeks into a randomly locking jaw and then eventually became a lifetime of TMJ issues. I got the best advice known to medical science (virtually zilch at the time), that the whole problem was obviously my fault because I must be clenching my jaw as I slept and the cure therefore, was to grind down all my teeth so that they couldn’t meet — or chew, I might add. Somehow, that astute intervention didn’t rectify the locking jaw.

Several years later, after Adam and I had been dating for a while, he realized how debilitating the locking jaw was and he encouraged me to keep searching for a solution. I consulted another clever, leech-bearing quack who gave me a prescription for a ludicrously powerful muscle relaxant. One month’s worth, no refills.

I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a powerful muscle relaxant for an entire month and then suddenly stopped, but the discontinuation has equally powerful repercussions. I didn’t sleep for four straight days.

I don’t know if you’ve ever failed to sleep for four straight days due to powerful muscle relaxant withdrawals, but the deprivation has powerful repercussions. By the end of the fourth day, I got lost walking back to my apartment after class. I sat down and cried in the middle of the checkout line when the university store didn’t have my favorite gum. I talked to my Bono poster and may have heard him respond. I was deliriously unwell.

Meanwhile, Adam was driving trade show gear cross country to Washington, DC and back to Dallas; with only a handful of quarters and a few scattered pay phones keeping us in brief contact once a day. Day Five of his roadtrip aligned with Day Four of my sleep deprived unhingement and when he finally found a moderately safe payphone in downtown DC that night, I had crumbled into weepy ruins.

Through heaving, labored sobs I begged him to come home and never leave me again, “I … (gasp)… just (gasp) … miss you (gasp) … SO MUCH (gasp)! Come home and marry me.”

He was confused. “Wait. Really? I’ve asked you to marry me more than a dozen times over the last two years. Why now?”

It was suddenly oh so clear to me: “Because I can’t live without you any more. Will you marry me?” He agreed. The gasping stopped and we were engaged.

It was a very bad, no good, really delusional proposal. But it worked.

Today is our 36th anniversary and I am immensely thankful that four days of withdrawal-insomnia broke my mind open enough to realize that Adam was my one and only.