I awoke with a stabbing pain in my heart. For a moment I did not know where I was. Then I remembered: I was back in the room I’d grown up in, at my mother’s house in Pennsylvania. It was Christmas morning, 1987. The house was quiet, except for the hissing and clanking of its old steam radiators.

My lover lay next to me in my old bed, softly snoring, one hand resting on my ribs.

Not my lover, I thought. My fiancée. The night before, I’d proposed. The answer had been yes.

It was the diamond on my fiancée’s finger that was stabbing me. Sometime during the night, the ring had twisted around. Now the diamond was digging into my chest.

There are a lot of unusual things about our marriage, I guess, and the fact that the two of us are still together, 32 Christmases later, is probably not the least of them. But when it comes to the day of our engagement, we were a cliché. Christmas Day and Christmas Eve are the most popular days to pop the question. New Year’s Eve is a close third.