The Start Alice and Ale met for the first time at the very beginning of 2016, at an Ultimate Frisbee tournament in LA. Both were newly in the Bay Area- a return home for Alice after 4 years living primarily in Tuscany, with winters in Boston, and a brand new home for Ale, making his way west over time from where he grew up south of Boston. Ultimate in the Bay was about to become a core community for both of them, over the next 3 years especially and to this day. They quickly became part of a tight-knit crew of friends who all moved in together in a 4 bed apartment in the Castro in SF. Ale and Alice were close friends and roommates for nearly 3 years (while dating other people) and talked endlessly about life, social dynamics, and very specific 2000s sitcoms (30 Rock, Community), websites (Gawker, Jezebel, Deadspin), and hilariously failed startups (Juicero). They remained trusted supports as they all moved on to new apartments (and sports, and career changes). Even then, they remained platonic, checking in on each other more often through the cycles of quarantine, breakups, and layoffs. The Middle Alice embarked on a major career change, and moved across the country once again to attend Columbia University’s School of Nursing in May of 2021, just as both of them became single for the first time in their long friendship. Ale remained in San Francisco, loving his ever evolving work in solar and clean energy and his community, but somehow the distance resulted in them talking more, not less – first over text, then over good old fashioned phone calls– and they both began to wonder if there might be something more there… A theory seemingly disproven by the weekend Ale visited Alice in NYC and they went on a series of romantic sunset walks of the Highline, dinner dates and drinks, Ale waking up at 5am to watch Alice win a bike race in the rain, brunches and Shakespeare in the Park, all without either of them ever making a move. Perhaps it was not to be they each thought. And neither wanted to risk losing a long and trusted friendship to a potentially unrequited romantic whim. Over Christmas that year, Alice came home to the Bay to see her brothers while Ale flew to Boston, to see his family- they overlapped for just one night in SF, fortuitously, so Ale could hand off the keys to his studio apartment so Alice could cat-sit. That night they went to dinner with Alice’s brother, and walking home in the rain, they held hands and kissed for the first time. And it made all the sense in the world. Ale immediately got in a car to his flight, but when he returned a week later, they fell right back into the moment they’d left. A Covid + test reappeared, this time as a charming subplot which resulted in the two of them with minor symptoms quarantining in his studio for 2 weeks straight–an incubation period for the virus and the relationship. It still didn’t feel like enough time to spend together, and barely days into it the words of ‘love’ and ‘marriage’ were floated. The Happily Ever... Dating long-distance for 6 months meant having regular excuses to fly across the country to NYC or SF and try a new restaurant or explore a new neighborhood, which wasn’t so bad. They capped it off with 2 weeks in Italy after Alice’s 6-week clinical capstone as a nurse in a Torino hospital. When she graduated in August 2022, she moved immediately back to SF and in with Ale and Magpie, his faithful and incompetent feline companion. After another move to a plant filled home in Cole Valley, already an entire year into working as an PICU RN at Stanford for Alice, and too many inside jokes, delicious home dinners, and late night phone calls to count, they’re so excited to have this week at Oz Farm to celebrate their life and their future together with their families and communities. They still never have enough time to tell each other everything they want to say each day.