We’re getting married!

A modern love story, Alex and Taylor met on a dating app back in 2016. Taylor was very anti-dating apps. Having lived in Colorado his whole life, he felt like it should be easy enough to meet people organically. Alex was new to Colorado, so for her it was a fun way to learn the city. Alex was Taylor's first dating app date ever. After matching with each other, Taylor caught Alex's attention by sparking conversation about Towson University. She had not met anyone in Colorado who even knew where Towson was. Luckily, Taylor's lacrosse career came in handy as it led him to Baltimore multiple times in the past. When he asked her if she ever had a crab pretzel at Bill Batemans (obviously, yes of course she had) she knew she had to at least go on a date with this guy. They set a date to meet on Monday, July 18th (now known as "The Mondate"). That Monday finally came along and Alex decided she needed to cancel the date because she accidentially stayed out too late with some new friends the night before and was not feeling her best. The day went on and she had not heard from Taylor at all, so she decided not to send Taylor a text to cancel because it seemed maybe Taylor didn't want to go anymore either. Alex left work around 6pm that night and her phone started to ring as soon as she gets in the car. Low and behold, it was Taylor. In his happy go lucky way, he asked if tonight still worked, and if she wanted to grab drinks at a little taco restaurant in Wash Park. Since she did not have the guts to say no over the phone, she went to meet up with him that night. Alex pulled up to the restaurant and saw Taylor sitting at a table outside. It had been raining, so when she arrived, Taylor used his own pants to dry off her chair. Instead of just drinks it turned to dinner, and at that moment she was very happy she never sent that text to cancel the date! As for Taylor, he went on his first and last dating app date that night.

The reality is that I had been thinking about proposing for a while, in fact I had sat down with Noodles (Alex's Dad) to ask his permission in July of 2021! I had no concrete plan, but with her family living out of state I figured that I might not see him again in person before I propose sometime later that year. Around the same time Al's engagement inquisition turned into a true full court press. Having close to zero knowledge of diamonds/jewelry, I appreciated the nightly education as to what style of engagement ring she liked... the only problem was that the style changed wildly every couple of weeks. Each time I would have something picked out, she would show me a completely different style of ring and I would be back to the drawing board. Before you know it I had absolutely no clue what type of ring she wanted. Unlike her indecision on engagement ring style, she was steadfast in not wanting to comingle an engagement with the holiday season (for Alex the holiday season spans from October through the New Year). This pushed things off until 2022. The full court pressure began to extend to essentially all of our friend and family, and I am sure Alex started to wonder if this was ever going to happen. I finally felt confident in the ring, and now just needed to plan a surprise. We had spent many previous 4th of July’s in Vail for the lacrosse shootout, and after a less than impressive 2021 performance, I finally promised a retirement. We agreed that visiting my sister in Charleston would be a great way to spend our first 4th of July outside of Vail. After initially planning to propose on that trip, I realized that we would both want her nieces to be a part of the big day. The only problem... the nieces would be Vail! After some coordinating with Al's sister, and heavy convincing, we were heading right back where we had spent that weekend so many years prior. The morning of the engagement I went on a "run" where I met up with some of my cousins to decide exactly where to bend the knee. The Betty Ford Alpine Garden is absolutely beautiful, and the park below was the perfect place to coordinate a meet up between some of my Family and Alex's family before dinner in the Village. I convinced Alex to come explore the Gardens, and as we both would have wanted, Alex's niece Ruby was right there with us the whole time. Needing just a few seconds for "the moment" I told Rubes that I would time how fast she could run to the other side of the garden and back. As soon as she took of, I got down on one knee, and the rest is history!