Scenarios: Should you get engaged on a trip for someone’s wedding?

On The Gee and Ursula Show, hosts Gee Scott and Ursula Reutin give advice to help other people in a segment called … Scenarios.

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Scenario described by Gee Scott: I usually don’t put names into it, but I’m allowed to put names into it because all of those participants are here. So Heather Bosch sends an email to Chef, Ursula, and I, and the email says, ‘Hey, we are having a heated discussion in the newsroom about whether it’s appropriate to get engaged when you’re in Europe for someone else’s wedding. And if you do pop the question, should you do that immediately before or after the wedding?’ Kate Stone came in this morning, and we were talking about the scenarios and Kate Stone says, ‘oh, yeah, Aaron Granillo.’ So BAM, Aaron Granillo is the person whom all kinds of names are being dropped. Aaron Granillo is here. Heather Bosch is here.

Ursula Reutin: What’s so nice is I went out there to the newsroom, I said, ‘Ok, give me the whole scoop here so I can present it appropriately and accurately.’ And Aaron said, I’ll go in.

Gee: So what happened?

Aaron Granillo: I get the invite to my buddy’s wedding in France about a year before, so we can plan. So I’m saving up for a year to go to this wedding in France. Now, I’m ready to marry my wife within that year. I’m saying, ‘okay, if I’m going to propose to my wife, I’m going to do it in Europe.’ So we make a big trip out of this. Two weeks before the wedding, we go to Italy. And then we make a pitstop in Switzerland, and then we go to France. We’re big winos, we love our wine. So while we’re in Italy, we go to wine country, Tuscany, San Gimignano, a beautiful walled city. About a week before the wedding, I popped the question at sunset. It was a beautiful night. I’m in Europe with my wife. I’ve not been back since. It was romantic. Is there a better setting in your mind where you could propose to your significant other?

Ursula: Ok, so that all sounds great. So then what happened, though? You have this wedding, do you announce that at the wedding?

Aaron: Of course not! My wife’s not even in the wedding party. She doesn’t really know my friends all that well.

Ursula: Well, it doesn’t even sound like there’s a problem.

Aaron: Thank you, Ursula!

Ursula: Wait a minute, because I have seen those situations where someone goes and gets engaged, and does it right before the actual wedding. And then suddenly, the news of that engagement overshadows the wedding.

Aaron: Not to mention we’re in France, and the whole wedding party is pretty much French. They don’t even speak English. I can’t even tell them that I am engaged to my wife – my fiancée at the time.

Gee: So, in the newsroom, who was against it? Oh, she’s right here, Kate Stone.

Kate Stone: You didn’t even give me a chance to defend myself. You just jumped in on this.

Ursula: Ok, so what was your issue with this?

Kate: I’m just saying that if I’m getting married, and my friends show up at my wedding with a big engagement ring on. Yeah, okay, maybe they don’t say anything, but everyone’s going to notice. So it’s kind of drawing a little bit of attention. It’s a little bit of thunder stealing, and I’m not the only one who thinks this, Chris Sullivan agreed with me.

Aaron: Ok, so are you not allowed to go to a wedding with an engagement ring on then? Is that what you’re saying?

Kate: Not a new one, Aaron.

Aaron: How new is new? Could I propose two months earlier?

Ursula: So I’m going to go with since no one seemed to A.) even know your now wife. She wasn’t part of the wedding party. She didn’t announce the engagement, or you guys didn’t have this big thing right before this other couple got married. So you just took advantage of the fact that you were in Europe. Yeah, I think that’s perfectly appropriate. Now, what Kate is bringing up I think would be inappropriate if you stole someone else’s thunder and just threw it out there, and then everyone’s paying attention to the engagement ring instead of the wedding.

Gee: Well, the thunders going to get stolen anyways. You know what I mean? So no matter how you slice it, because I know how people are. You show up with that engagement ring, everybody is like, ‘did you get engaged?’ ‘Yeah, we got engaged just a week ago.’ ‘Oh my goodness.’ So at the wedding, everybody’s talking about that. But here’s my simple example of this, if you have a destination wedding, unless you’re paying for it, it ain’t none of your damn business what I do when I’m on my vacation. If you paid to go to Paris and go ahead and get engaged, let me say this again, it ain’t none of your business.

Ursula: Our listener Brian texted in, do not upstage the newlyweds.

Kate: Thank you, Brian.

Ursula: Okay, so you had a destination wedding, Gee. You went to Destin, Florida, to get married? Correct?

Gee: Yes.

Ursula: So if one of your friends came, let’s just say that someone got engaged. Are you going to be upset if they announce it?

Gee: No, they went out there. The problem in this world is that we feel like we got ownership over people that come to a wedding of ours. You do what you want to. As long as you didn’t pop the question in the wedding.

Aaron: Of course not.

Ursula: Social media posts? Nothing to steal the thunder?

Kate: Just the ring.

Aaron: Not even social media posts.

Gee: You didn’t even post on social media?

Aaron: Not ’til I got back home.

Gee: No player, go ahead, spend that money. I post when I want to.

Ursula: How about this? Here’s a first. We had friends who actually spent their honeymoon with us in Europe. That’s a whole other story.

Kate: That’s a tease.

Ursula: So I was like, ‘are you sure you want to be with us on your honeymoon?’

Gee: Heather Bosch, thank you for sending us the newsroom stuff.

Ursula: And Kate, thank you for your passion.

Gee: Can I start doing that? Can I start bringing newsroom discussions to the radio?

Listen to Gee Scott and Ursula Reutin weekday mornings from 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.