Some love stories start with a spark. Ours started with a slow burn, the kind you don’t fully understand until years later, when you look back and realize the beginning was there all along. We met back in high school. We both had a thing for art, so we ended up in class after class together, always under the same teacher, always somehow in the same room. We got to know each other in that easy, unhurried way you do when you’re young, sharing tables, trading glances, building the kind of quiet crushes neither of us was brave enough to say out loud. It was there. We both knew it was there. But we were kids, and the timing wasn’t ours yet. Then life did what life does. We graduated, went our separate ways, and the years stacked up. New places, new chapters, the whole world pulling us in different directions. But some people don’t really leave you. They just wait somewhere in the back of your mind, and every so often you wonder. So a few years ago, I stopped wondering and reached out to her on Facebook. We met up for brunch, and I swear the second we sat down it was like no time had passed at all. All those years, all that distance, and somehow we picked up right where we left off. We spent hours reminiscing about high school, laughing about who we used to be, and underneath all of it, feeling that same old spark, only this time it had grown into something steadier and deeper. This time, we weren’t kids anymore. This time, we weren’t going to let the moment slip away. Everything after that felt like coming home. We built a life together, and before long we bought our first house, the first walls that were truly ours. About two months later, I knew it was time. There was just one more thing I wanted to give her first. Here’s the thing about her: she’d never been on an airplane. She’d barely been outside of Indiana, and in all her life she had never once seen the ocean. So I planned a trip to Destin, Florida, one week before her birthday in October of 2025, and I didn’t tell her the real reason we were going. We landed, and less than two hours later we were walking up to dinner. There was a table waiting just for the two of us, set right on the sand, with the ocean stretched out endlessly in front of her. It was her first time ever stepping onto a beach, her first time hearing the waves up close, and she had no idea that within minutes she would also be saying yes. When the server came to take our drink order, I quietly showed him the note I’d typed on my phone, please take pictures, I’m about to propose, and he understood the assignment perfectly. As the excitement built, so did the nerves. I pulled her close and kissed her one last time, knowing that the moment we let go, everything was about to change. Then I got down on one knee. As the shock spread across her face and the tears welled up in my own eyes, with the ocean behind us and the whole world feeling like it had gone quiet, I asked the love of my life the famous question.