Marko and I met in early 2009 when we were serving in Finnish Defence Forces as conscripts. He was already a officer candidate when I was a mere jaeger. Nothing happened back then - we just knew each other by name.
It was in summer 2010 when something actually started to happen. I had been a reservist for half a year and he had been one for a year. We had been FB friends for months for basically no reason. One night he started a private conversation with me because he was lonely and bored and I happened to be online. The reason for him to do this was because he had been in a hospital for long time - for cancer. Hodgin's disease, to be more specific.
I was lonely too, living alone in a small apartment in Helsinki and just working. I was too depressed to go out and spend time with friends. Having conversations with him helped us both, I think. Soon we spent all out evenings talking for hours and hours, using MSN Messenger's video chats.
I eventually travelled to Tampere to go meet him in the hospital. We talked and walked around the hospital, he with his IV pole in tow. It was a friendly visit back then, but we like to think now that it was our first date. How romantic, first date in a cancer ward!
So, he stayed in the hospital while I continued working and travelled a bit. I also had applied to a academy in a small town near Finland's eastern border.
During the summer time we actually started a relationship. We already lived 200 km apart when we started, but it soon changed to 300 km as I got into that said academy and had to move away from Helsinki. We saw each other every other weekend. I was usually me who travelled the 300 km by train for Tampere is a big city with a lot to do instead of that small town I now lived.
In 2011 I moved to Tampere and we started to live together. We got a rather nice rental apartment near the city center. We both studied in different vocational schools and lived our lives doing just that.
In 2014 we graduated from our schools and started to work. I'm a scenic artist and he is an electritian. By 2015 we moved into a much larger and nicer apartment in which was on the edge of the city. I was in spring 2015 when he finally proposed.
We actually had talked about wedding stuff for over a year. We weren't engaged or actually had real wedding plans, but we already knew that we wanted to do steampunk themed ones as we both were really into the style. It was in 2011 when we both dressed in steampunk outfits for Ropecon. I had been doing that for modeling photoshoots for a few years longer though. That picture of us, hanging on the side of the page all the time, was taken in Ropecon 2011.
A lot of people are telling stories about romantic and big proposals. Well, this isn't one of them. For quite some time our parents had been asking about marriage. In autumn 2014 Marko had asked for my hand from my father and he had agreed. But still it was already spring 2015 when he actually managed to propose. :D
I was fast asleep in our bed and it was in the middle of the night. He woke me up, put a ring to my finger and said: "what say you?" like Aragorn did in LOTR Return of the King. I didn't believe him at first - after all, the day was April Fool's Day! Eventually he convinced me about being serious and there we where, engaged to be married. And don't get me wrong, of course I loved the way he proposed: the only way he could actually surprise me was to wake me up, because I'm never too easily fooled. And I would have hated him for doing it somewhere in public. So, it was a genuine surprise and just the two of us, and for being total geeks the quote was funny and fitting.
Two weeks later we got our engagement rings, made of titanium. We knew we wanted to have an autumn wedding, so we desided to go for autumn 2016 as 5 months was way too little time for us to go with autumn 2015. And here we are, arranging a lot of things and saving money!
There will be other posts about the venue, menu, decorations and all those other things when I have the time. The most of it will be published after the wedding, but for steampunk brides and grooms of 2017 and forward, I hope you find some awesome tips from my blog! ^_^
- Mea
