“I just loved being with him. I don’t mean like every waking moment of every day but he became my safe haven, the person who I could be myself with – in all my eccentric splendor. “I’ve read that marriage is not about being with who you can live with, it’s about being with someone you can’t live without. I can’t live without me some Rory,” the swooned new Mrs Gilkes remarks. He proposed to her on her birthday (February 2). “Now, that day I ran into an old schoolmate of mine who asked me what my boyfriend would be doing for me for my birthday and I said I hoped he had booked another staycation for us – I love those things. My friend said ‘I bet he’s going to propose’ and I started to laugh and told him ‘yeah right, in that case I should practice how to respond’.” “I got a call later that day from Rory asking me to come home. I got excited because I thought maybe he had packed our stuff and we were off on a staycation. “When I got home, he put me to sit on the bed and asked me to close my eyes. I heard him rustling a lot of paper
34 FOREVER I DO
JANUARY
and I thought, ‘ok, no staycation but a big gift then?’ I sat there for a while then he said to me to open my eyes and there he was, kneeling in front of me, with a white box in the palm of his hand beaming from ear to ear,” she recalls. Rory notes then that his thinking at the time was that his proposal would really be “a rhetorical question”: “I thought I could just place the ring on her little finger and we could go to a church any day of the week and be husband and wife, so when she said yes it was like “of course it’s yes”. But then he got a reality check! While on his bended knee with that beautiful diamond in hand Rory was almost put to tears. He says the sight of Janelle’s reaction when she saw the box which was screaming and laughing before actually jumping on the bed, it was all he could do not to tear up with excitement himself. Janelle adds that he barely got the question out before she said yes. Rory continues: When she finally came back to the ground after walking all over the bedroom ceiling, I had time to compose myself and asked ‘the