My grandmother gave me a $1,000 for not getting married and all I got was these pink shoes

My grandmother, apparently, has been troubled with the unconventional state of both my brother's and my relationship with our significant others.  You know that whole pesky "we're not married" thing.  I guess it has been troubling her as she has given some money to my cousins when they were married, but here are Jay and I, both in very long term relationships and yet no prospect of marriage is looming on the horizon.
She did come to terms with it recently, and sent both my brother and I a cheque for $1,000 to acknowledge our partners as being her grandson and granddaughter-in-law, which was very nice, but it came with a very lengthy card about how she loves us and our partners, but it would make her very happy if we were to get married.  I was rather impressed that she was so adamant about expressing her views at 88 years of age, but naturally I didn't point out the fallacy of the "sanctity of marriage".
Tiger Woods was married.  Britney Spears got married and divorced within - what was it? - 48 hours or so?  The divorce rate is about 50%.  The infidelity rate is around 40%.  People go from standing on the altar in their white dress and professing that it's the happiest day of their life to commandeering lawyers at $350 to ruin the other person.  Kim Kardashian.
I was out for dinner with R last night and I was relaying this story to her and she's married (on her second marriage, even), and she's of the opinion that marriage is more of a personal thing that is important at a certain point in time between two people who value it equally.
So basically it's the opposite position that society takes which is: You've been dating for two years and he hasn't put a ring on it?  There must be something wrong with you and you are lacking as a potential life partner and you're running out of relationship options and you probably harbor weird, feminist ideals and don't cook or shave your legs nearly often enough and so that's why he hasn't dropped $5k at Michael Hill for you to be princess for a day.
Needless to say I am in agreement with Renee.  I can take marriage or I can leave it.  And I did leave it for a long time, but it is something that has become important to me for its symbolism.  Plus I'm going all out Vera Wang and my budget is going to be $30,000.
Not all of the above is true.
Anyways, I deposited my cheque today and gave half to Michael vis a vis waiving his $500 March rent (I will interject here that the $500 a month I charge him includes heat, long distance, his parking space and food - most of which I cook) and then I went grocery shopping and then I made some sort of mango curry chicken dinner, and also a lentil prawn daal sort of deal because for about two hours I was channeling Martha Stewart.
This rarely, if ever, happens.
And then I went to buy some new running shoes for Boston.
Here's a tip for staying within your shoe budget when you go shoe shopping: tell them what your budget is.
See, I failed to do this and I gesticulated wildly and threw my orthotics around and pointed at my ankle and whined when they didn't have a pair of replacement New Balance 1080s in my size and so I said, "Well, what else might work?".
I must've tried on five pairs of shoes, each increasingly more wonderful than the last.  To her credit - after I narrowed it down to a couple of pairs of Asics - she made me put one on one foot and one on another and I was still all "No: these ones are the bomb".
And the bomb they were, as she disclosed.  Nay, they were the "Cadillac" of shoes and were $189.  Whaddya do?  They were, by far, the sweetest shoes I'd tried on, and I've worn a lot of shoes in my day as evidenced from this post from 2008.
The sales lady said that the pink would make me run faster and so I bought them.