You may not know, but Mariah can read my mind, so it was important to me to surprise her. Which was made all the more difficult by the fact that she helped me pick out the ring.

Probably 3 days before I asked, I started asking her for tips on my single leg takedown. For what it’s worth Mariah has been doing jiu jitsu for three years and I’ve been doing it for three weeks. If you don’t know, a single leg involves:

• getting low
• stepping within grab range of someone
• picking up their leg
• taking them down

For my purposes, I needed to smoothly do the first two bullets. Essentially me getting down on one knee in front of her standing. Thankfully, I suck at doing these. So, Mariah was anything but suspicious when I was asking for tips about single leg takedown technique.

Montage me making this more of a thing. Over a few days, I kept asking her for tips for single legs, shoots, etc.; basically how I could more smoothly kneel to propose.

This morning, in that liminal space between getting ready and leaving, I surreptitiously sat at my nightstand and pocketed the ring box. My heart rate rising, I started practicing my single legs by myself in the living room.

I was nervously palming the ring box in and out of my hand. I was making sure that the clam shell opened out. I was repositioning it so I could easily grab it. All while acting like I was taking down some invisible opponent.

Then Mariah comes into the room seeing me practicing my shoots. I all but blurt, “so when I do my step in, how do I pull the other one through to be strong?” She helped me with patience. I gave it two practice reps of her giving me single leg tips.

Then smoothly, I said “you mean like this” and:

1. Grabbed the ring box from my pocket
2. Dropped my knee, cracking the clamshell
3. Said “will you marry me”

After her shock of being surprised subsided, she said “yes”! Then we gushed over each other and talked about how much we loved one another. Afterward, we were off getting breakfast, like we will be doing for a long time.