‘I had kept everything to do with us like receipts and cinema tickets ...’
Mark Maginty (29), an electronic engineering lecturer, lives with his wife, Amanda, in Toome. He says:
Amanda and I met at a place called The Washbasin — a Christian outreach centre — when we were about 16. I proposed in June 2010. It took quite a bit of planning. I collected everything to do with Amanda — everything she ever gave me, all of our dinner receipts, all of our cinema tickets and more.
I collected everything together in a book, along with photos that marked the major occasions like birthdays and Valentine’s Day. Amanda always loved flowers but, of course, they die quickly, so I got a real rose dipped in gold and then organised balloons — hundreds of them. They took hours to blow up with my friends.
We’re part of the same church team and I got the leader to email Amanda for a meeting at the Washbasin — the place where we first met. Amanda actually thought it was a party for someone else and we shouldn’t go in. She was totally taken aback when I pulled out the ring and went down on one knee.
It took a lot of planning. For a few months a mate and I would get together once or twice a week to plan the proposal. I got the ring a year earlier — Amanda had come with my family on a trip to Florida and had pointed out a diamond ring, so my dad and I got up early the next day to go and buy it.
Every time we hear of friends getting engaged, my story gets told again. We got married in 2011 at the Templeton Hotel.”
University lecturer Amanda (28) says:
We had discussed getting married a year before the proposal and had looked at rings that I thought were pretty, but I put it to the back of my mind. I was still at university at the time. It was quite a surprise when Mark asked me because I wasn’t expecting it at all.
I really thought that we were gatecrashing someone else’s function when we first arrived at the hall.
It was really thoughtful, and it’s lovely to have those memories now, eight years on. I know the lady who runs the centre still talks about how romantic Mark’s proposal was.
I was 20 when we got engaged and we were together for four years before that. At that point we had had a lot of experiences together — it’s lovely to know that we grew up together too.”