I spent years loving a man, thinking we’d be together forever, only to end up the punchline of his twisted joke on the night I thought he’d propose. What started as a dreamy anniversary dinner turned into the most humiliating moment of my life, until I turned the tables.

So yesterday was our third anniversary. I spent the whole week believing it was the night my boyfriend would finally propose.

He fueled my suspicions by making reservations at a restaurant, but when his true intentions were revealed, I was forced to retaliate.

Okay, let me backtrack a bit. My boyfriend’s name is Ryan, and he’s 29, just like me. We don’t live together yet, but we’ve been talking about it more earnestly this year.

We’ve even discussed if we should get a dog when we do.

On our anniversary, he’d made a reservation at a cozy restaurant tucked downtown. It was nicer and fancier than the places we usually frequented, the kind of place that had flickering candles and linen napkins folded with tweezers.

Ryan told me to dress nice and said he had a “special surprise” planned. I hadn’t even hinted about a proposal.

I believed I didn’t need to. I just knew.

So, I got my nails done, curled my hair, dressed up, super excited, thinking the moment I’d been waiting for was finally here. I wore a long emerald-green dress, the one he once said made me look like something out of a movie.

My heart was light.

Even though my week at work had been brutal, I refused to let it drag me down that night.

The thing was, I had been up for a promotion, something I’d worked for nonstop over the last year.

I stayed late, ran point on the company’s most complicated client project, and even mentored the guy, Matt, who eventually got the position instead of me.

Matt was literally fresh out of graduate school.

You want to know why he got it? Because of office rumors that I was probably going to get married and have a baby soon.

Apparently, being a 29-year-old woman in a corporate setting makes you a liability. No one said it out loud, of course, but it was the quiet talk near the vending machines.

“Upper management doesn’t like investing in someone who might vanish for a year,” one of the admins whispered when I asked if she’d heard anything.

I smiled like it didn’t bother me, then cried in my car. Of course, I told Ryan all about it when I got home and thought he genuinely sympathized with my situation and understood where I was coming from.