Earlier this week, I proposed to my girlfriend, Robyn.  There is an obvious protocol regarding the order in which folks are notified and how personal it is.   For us, the situation is complicated by the distances between us and many of our friends and family members.    (Robyn is from Durban, South Africa.  I grew up in Michigan, Hawaii and California, but currently live in Zürich, Switzerland.  We both have lived in the UK, and we met in Portland, Oregon.)  Here is how it played out:

1. Tuesday 8pm, over dinner: Propose!  "Yes!"
   
2. Tuesday 9pm: Skype Out to Alice, my sister, on her mobile phone.  She is going camping with her family and our mother north of Los Angeles.
3. Tuesday 9:30pm: Attempt to Skype Out to both mother and father--no luck.  Mom's signal is weak and dad's phone goes straight to voice mail.
4. Wednesday 7pm: Skype Dad's mobile phone in Michigan, chat for a bit.  Skype Mom's mobile, get through at the camping spot, all is good.
5. Wednesday 8pm: Post cryptic line on Facebook status that the friends we have in common will understand:  "Joe E. called it months ago. We officially and openly hear the bells ringing some time soon--the laces of two boots are getting all knotted up."  Robyn texts people madly on her mobile phone.  Her own Facebook status reads "said YES!"
6. Wednesday 830pm: We both update our status to 'engaged'.  (It's not official until it's on Facebook!)
   
7. Wednesday 9pm: Skype Out or Video Skype with close friends, like Whitey in Massachusetts, who are available.  Emails for the rest.
8. Wednesday 10pm: Post new thread to forums of BootsnAll.com, the travel community website that we and many of our friends met through.
9. Wednesday 1020pm: Post to Facebook pictures of Robyn reading up on visa requirements on the web.
   
10. Thursday: Respond to various emails, IMs and BnA posts through out the day.
11. Thursday 330pm: Robyn (@dopeyzn) tweets on Twitter "got engaged to @stuinzuri... super duper stoked :)"
12. Friday 1PM: Find that our engagement ranks a post on BootBlog: There’s gonna be a Bootie wedding!  We are celebrities now!
13. Friday 430pm: If one googles "Stu and Robyn" the first link is to the BootBlog post!

What strikes me as interesting, and a change from how I would expect things to have played out just a two decades ago, is the cornucopia of technologies and mediums we used to communicate our engagement.  Not just email and traditional telephones, but also internet messaging, web site forums, Voice over IP, cellular telephony, blogs, Facebook and Twitter.  Real time communications, store and forward, push.  Text, voice, video and still photography. 

Welcome to the future.  May we live happily ever after.