While doing some grocery shopping with his girlfriend, Emily Hardman, on New Year’s Eve, Rob Reading decided to buy an engagement ring for exactly $8.88 at Walmart. Later on that same day, he proposed to the love of his life during a hike in Sedona Verde Valley, Arizona.
Spoiler alert: Emily said “yes.”
![Pinterest](https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https://faithit.com/emily-hardman-rob-reading-engaged-wedding-planned-5-days/&media=https://faithit.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ring4.4.17.jpg&description=When Emily called a wedding planner and told her she had just gotten engaged and that the wedding was a mere five days away, she got back a "choking cough" and a "Is this a joke?”){kind=link}
Photo: Emily Hardman
But that’s not what’s gaining this story some serious viral attention.
The fun was JUST getting started…
When Emily called a wedding planner and told her she had just gotten engaged and that the wedding was a mere five days away, she got back a “choking cough” and a “Is this a joke?”
But it wasn’t a joke, and after the wedding planner recovered her wits (with the bride throwing in an “and no, I’m not pregnant” in there), Hardman had her wedding luncheon planned for five days hence—in just about an hour on the phone.
Why the rush? Well, as Hardman explained in an article she wrote for the New York Times, she and her now-husband, Rob, had known each other for four years and had been dating for one. Because of their crazy work and travel schedules, it was either “get married in a week or in a year,” and because they “already knew [they] wanted to spend eternity together,” they opted for the five-day plan.
And for what it’s worth, I think they got it EXACTLY right.
In a society where weddings are BIG, BIG business (I’m talking billions of dollars per year) and Pinterest boards overflow with the push for down-to-the-last-detail PERFECTION, Hardman and Reading were focused on what REALLY mattered: the marriage, not the wedding.
“I had become convinced that modern weddings had become way too burdensome,” Hardman told ABC News. “Starting at age 17, I started helping my friends and my siblings plan their weddings, and I just saw this stress that was going into the napkin colors…and I just thought nobody is going to notice the napkin colors, nobody is going to walk out with their bag of peanuts and be like, ‘Wow, I just feel so loved that you stayed up for three days tying a ribbon around these peanuts.'”