I am engaged. I have a fiancé. Those words still feel as weird coming out of my mouth as they do typing them. Just the other day when I was on the phone with someone I said, “Oh, I need to remind my boyfr – I mean, fiancé of our plans.” It felt so incredibly weird to say but natural at the same time.
This, as I have been reminded over the past few weeks since our engagement, has been a long time coming. The road to my now fiancé proposing to me on my radio show with thousands of people listening and watching online has been a bumpy one – but that’s most of life, right?
On the morning of Friday, Oct. 9, I walked into the radio studio prepared to put on another fast-paced morning show. We had a lot scheduled for that morning and I was awake and ready to be the air traffic controller of the organized chaos that usually describes our morning show.
I started the segment like I usually do, “Hot 101.5 with Miguel and Holly,” when suddenly a sign floated down outside of our third-story window. It read: ‘Hey you, come here! Look down!”
Most professional broadcasters would have kept on going but I am not that person. I get distracted very easily so of course I stopped what I was saying on the air and asked the other members of the show to look down and see what was outside. No one volunteered to look out the window so I left my chair and got up to see what was going on, all live on the air.
My then-boyfriend was standing in the parking lot looking up at me. That’s when I knew what was happening. After that it was a blur of a proposal, of friends calling and texting me to say congratulations. It was a 24-hour whirlwind that everyone knew about except for me.
How did we get to this moment? What did I have to endure before this? A lot of hard lessons.
Right before my fiancé and I got together in 2017, I had declared that I was okay with being single for the rest of my life. I had gotten to the point of complete and total frustration with the dating process.
Between the ghosting, the awkward dates, the casual hook ups, the bread crumbers (yes, that’s an actual dating term) and the total lack of guys just wanting to go on a nice romantic date like the movies, I was done.
I once went on a date with a guy who brought along his dog for the second date. No problem for me until he put queso on his lips and invited the dog to lick it off. There was also the time I went on a date with a guy that was so hammered he wanted me to put a part of my body into a glass of wine. Between those types of situations and my general lack of confidence, I was striking out. Then came the movie “Girls Trip.”
Queen Latfiah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Tiffany Haddish and Regina Hall made one of the few movies I can watch multiple times. This was Haddish’s breakout role because she showed us how funny she can be on the screen. Little has been written about one of its final scenes, but it changed the dating game for me when I watched the movie for the first time. I know it may seem excessive to say that a movie could do that, but hear me out.
I won’t give anything away but a character is talking about what she learned from her previous relationship and what lessons she was taking with her. She says, “I know that there are a lot of us who stay in bad relationships because we have convinced ourselves that being disrespected is better than being alone. But we shouldn’t fear being alone, because there is power in rediscovering your own voice, and I had forgotten that.”
MIND. BLOWN.
I remember sitting in the theater and wishing I had a DVR remote so that I could go back and rewind that scene. I realized that for so long I was trying to find someone just for the sake of finding someone.
I was so afraid of being alone that I felt like I could sacrifice everything to make it happen. After that movie, I quickly changed the way I viewed dating. I was no longer looking for someone to make me feel better; I was looking for someone to compliment my life. That’s when my now-fiancé Abe walked into my life.
What does this mean for you if you are single? Focus on yourself. Build the life you’ve always wanted to have and you’ll attract the right type of person. If it happened for me, it can sure enough happen for you.
Let me be your DVR and rewind those words from “Girls Trip” for you again: “I know that there are a lot of us who stay in bad relationships because we have convinced ourselves that being disrespected is better than being alone. But we shouldn’t fear being alone, because there is power in rediscovering your own voice, and I had forgotten that.”
Miguel Fuller is the host of “Miguel and Holly on HOT 101.5” in Tampa Bay and hosts daily segments on the nationally syndicated Dish Nation. See his life in pictures and videos on Instagram @MiguelFuller.
