Capsule #120 ft. Sophie Peachey

Hello hello,

Thank you for allowing me a break to go to Mexico and thank you to Circe for the Halloween issue in my absence! I’m back, I’m rested, and I’ve eaten better than any other time in my life. Special shout out to Esquina Común in Mexico City, and Labo Fermento and Tacos Del Carmen in Oaxaca.

I am also engaged! I went back and forth a lot about writing about it; of course I publish personal essays in Capsule all the time but this topic feels like a level up. But in the end it felt important, mainly because my reaction to the moment felt at odds with what I’d seen online and generally heard about. So let’s get into it!!!

Holly x

When you have been in a relationship for a long time - assuming you love each other and feel aligned on “values” in a broad sense - there are a few topics you inevitably tackle over the years. Kids is the big one, other large ones include where you want to live, the sort of lifestyle you want, and whether you’d like to get married. We’re all trying uncover what really matters to us - how we’d like to spend our time and our money - in a bid to prevent resentment down the line.

I’ve been in my relationship for seven years and Josh and I have talked about marriage a few times. In the early years, I thought it would be “cool” to have kids without being married (early 20s psychology coming in hot), and a bit later, my feelings changed. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why, but I put it down to a blend of getting older and my views maturing, going to a few weddings and realising I did find the whole thing to be deeply meaningful, and generally feeling a deep sense of commitment and seriousness about our relationship. That feeling of, oh, this is my life, it’s happening here right now. 

With that context, you’d expect, or at least I expected, that getting engaged would be a lovely little moment, like tying a ribbon on something already nice. Not totally necessary, and arguably less important than other aspects of a relationship to align on, but a sweet addition. But my experience surprised me.

Some important context is that I was somewhat on alert for a proposal. A few weeks before we left for Mexico, Josh suggested we each plan a “surprise day” for each other on the trip, something we have literally never done before. But at the same time, I stopped myself from thinking about it too much. It felt a bit like having a dream in which someone wrongs you, then feeling real emotions based on something that just didn’t happen. It’s easy to get in your head about these things.

So here’s what went down: We were on a run by the beach in Puerto Escondido, which took us up through some trees to a coastal hill. Built into this hill were some (empty) villas, through which you could sneak to access pools and patios perfectly positioned as viewpoints. We reached one, noticed a man clearing leaves out of a pool, and moved on. Trespassing through the second villa, Josh started acting strange. Pacing up and down. Eyes darting around. Then he turned to me and said something like, “Holly, I know I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” He took a breath and continued, “I’m going to propose to you now.”

And that’s the moment I blacked out. Not literally, but I have very little memory of the next few minutes, despite expecting I’d know how this moment would feel and how I’d respond. I know that I said yes, I knew I liked the ring, but most of it is a blur. I said we need to sit down and talk, my mind racing and body pooling with the physical manifestations of anxiety (or adrenaline).

My spiral focused around two main worries. First, that things between us would change. I kept saying that I like the way things are, and I don’t want them to be different. My mind had latched onto the worst case scenario, that an engagement and then marriage would somehow make our relationship worse. In hindsight it’s easy to diagnose this as textbook anxiety, but in the moment, I needed genuine reassurance that I wouldn’t be somehow punished for doing this. We spent the next five minutes making a very mundane list of all the things that would stay the same: We’d still live in the same flat, we’d have the same friends (and see them all the time), we’d watch the same TV shows, I’d have the same job. I nodded along, hinging off every word.

The second worry was more existential. I suddenly felt this onslaught of fear, followed by defensiveness around how I might be seen or treated differently as a married person. “I still want to be young, wild and free,” I said to Josh, knowing full well I mostly enjoy drinking tea and shopping for second hand furniture.

In just a few minutes, I felt like I’d crossed some sort of threshold, and that my appeal as a woman moving through the world would decline. “I don’t want to become invisible,” was another line I uttered, followed by “I don’t want people to expect me to be any different.” We unpacked the statements together, Josh repeatedly saying that this is for us, that it’s a result of me being exactly who I am, and not a bid to shift things. This is because of exactly who you are, I kept in my mind throughout the rest of the day.

I began feeling more normal as we shared the news with our close friends and family. Hearing people who know me well assure me that this reaction was very me, actually, made me feel seen and less insane. One of my oldest friends saw my mind trying to solve a bunch of problems and said “it’s so you to go into organisation mode even during your proposal.” My dad teased that maybe I was struggling because I usually control everything; this was an exception. And one of my friends called my spiral quite romantic, which I couldn’t see myself, but liked hearing. Still, I couldn’t help but feel sad and a little disoriented that I wasn’t having the response I’d expected, or felt was expected of me.

This is of course, in part, due to social media. During the proposal and in the hours afterwards, I envisioned all of the Instagram posts of engagements I’d seen over the years. I saw beautiful photographs captured at sunset and captions with the date, the ring emoji, and usually something like “the best day of my life so far.” Visualising these and weighing them up against my own experience made me feel anxious that I wasn’t experiencing that perceived sense of bliss.

I am not great at hiding my feelings, so I vowed to be honest with friends when sharing the story. In turn, women who are already married or currently engaged shared frank snippets of their experiences with me. They included:

Of course these are the bits you don’t see online. Hearing these words healed me in real time; my shoulders dropped, my jaw unclenched, I felt my mouth curl up into a smile. It was like receiving permission for joy to enter. I felt connected to these people on a new level, like they’d guided me blindfolded through a maze or given me a leg up to climb a wall and I was now witnessing the view.

One friend asked me if it was like starting your period, in the sense that you are handed this thing, which prompts you to cross over into a new level from which you cannot return. I thought it was a perfect analogy, a real image for the “threshold” I was feeling earlier, and one that reminded me that many of my worries were about the passage of time itself. Realising that life is moving forwards and so am I, that things cannot and will not always stay the same.

Staying the same, that was my main plea during our conversation after the proposal. I sought comfort in knowing our relationship would not change and neither would I. Yet a few days later, on the same topic, Josh corrected himself. To paraphrase, he said something like, you absolutely will change, and that’s kind of the point. What could be more freeing than a base from which to grow?

I wanted to share my experience because it can be extremely disorienting to feel like you are having a problematic response to an event that comes with so many scripts. It makes you start frantically troubleshooting at a time when your mind is on high alert, and also unearths unconscious feelings you may not know were there. I obviously had some hidden beliefs about what being a wife is like, and I feared them. I was genuinely surprised to not properly discover these until I was truly faced with the prospect. The disconnect between what I thought I knew, and what I came to know in the moment, was probably the most unsettling part. But it has already taught me a lesson that I know will repeat over and over again. You simply cannot take a shortcut to understanding experiences in your life without just doing them. You can read essays and talk to older women and watch films but you just cannot implant an emotion or plan a response. I know I’ll continue trying, because it’s the type of art and conversation I’m drawn to, but there is something incredibly freeing to know that all the preparation is just that. None of us know the real thing until it happens, and we should trust that we’ll have the adequate tools at our disposal when it arrives.

And finally…

News from the Capsule universe this week:

• The busiest girl in the world just got busier

• A nice clip of A$AP Rocky giving credit where it’s due (to Rihanna) on winning his CFDA award

• And some great looks from that event courtesy of Olivia Dean, Paloma Elsesser and Laura Harrier

• The Aftersun-ification of the John Lewis ad…(liked it)

• Sad to see Teen Vogue folded into Vogue.com and the politics team laid off

• Enjoying all the Rosalía lore, like this and this

• The reviews of All’s Fair, the new legal drama with Kim K, say it clearly: so bad it’s good

• In case you need a laugh

• Another great Robert Pattinson quote

• Olivier Rousteing is leaving Balmain after 14 years

• Obsessed with Rainey Qualley’s (Margaret’s sister) Halloween wedding 

• And glad everyone in the comments is feeling the same about the Timothée Chalamet Vogue cover 🥲

This week, Sophie Peachey popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Sophie is an award-winning freelance journalist and presenter, currently working at the BBC, The Times, The Guardian and The London Standard. She’s made documentaries on the sex for rent crisis, sextortion schemes, and the ghostwriters of OnlyFans. She is also a sex and relationships writer, with a keen focus on any stories she’s too squeamish to tell her parents.

📺 Watching: Die My Love in the cinema, the first episode of I Love LA, Oklou on Tiny Desk, this video of Dijon covering ‘YUKON’ by Justin Bieber, and let’s strap in for 48 minutes of Charli xcx on the Goop podcast with Gwyneth Paltrow.

📖 Reading: Different angles on relationships: Ella Emhoff on not wanting to live with her boyfriend, and Chanté Joseph’s viral Vogue article on asking whether having a boyfriend is embarrassing now. Some more good stuff: this piece on the link between Gen Z loneliness and Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign, and a different take on West End Girl.

🎧 Listening to: Lux, the new Rosalía album, about to spin ‘Mature,’ the new Hilary Duff (!) single, and catching up on important stuff like the full Hayley Williams x Bleachers performance for Rolling Stone.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear how you’re finding Capsule - let me know here. And if you have a friend who might like it, do refer them! 🥺

See you next week 💋

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