2002 was a year of transition, transformation, and confidence building. By winter both Ayanna and Chris were quietly shining, in their own ways. Ayanna taking their first big leaps into UU leadership and Chris diving deep into high school sports and band. Despite both being fairly social in the Atlanta UU youth scene and having multiple people in common, they had never met. Whether it was fate, inevitably, or boredom on the part of their peers, Ayanna and Chris were connected through the ancient millennial mating ritual of a 3 way call. Ayanna instantly took a liking to Chris. They continued to connect via phone (they moved to one on one conversations) and AIM through the end of the year. On MLK weekend, the weekend of Ayanna’s first solo coordinating and organizing endeavor, a social action youth con, Ayanna and Chris met for the first time. Sparks. On Saturday night, in the “rave room”, under twinkle and black lights to the sounds of Change by the Deftones, Ayanna and Chris shared their first kiss. As high school romances often do, they only lasted a few remarkable months.

On an Autumn 2004 afternoon, Ayanna spotted Chris walking on the sidewalk in Candler Park, an area that neither frequented. Chris accepted an invitation to join Ayanna and friends at Fellini's Pizza then Chris volunteered to drive Ayanna home to Stone Mountain. They quickly fell into a routine of pizza dates before breaking their romance off again. In May of 2005 Ayanna and Chris exchanged greetings at a house party and in their infinite teenage maturity, both independently decided not to approach the other again. Despite this, they kept track of each other’s lives through the grapevine and eventually moved from Myspace to Facebook friends. In the autumn of 2019, Ayanna and Chris reconnected by making each other laugh in a mutual friend’s comment section. This moved to Chris sliding into Ayanna’s dms and progressed to long phone calls. Ayanna and Chris stayed in each other’s minds over the years showing up in liked Facebook posts and even woven into a couple of sermons. At no point were they ever completely removed from each other.

Proposal!?! Ha! Ayanna and Chris co-daydreamed and then negotiated their way into a surprise (to them both) engagement. On February 18, 2023, Ayanna and Chris celebrated Valentine’s Day with dinner at Chef Wu’s followed by a viewing of Wakanda Forever. Halfway through the movie, they stopped to take a chat break. They talked through immediate travel plans then moved onto a hypothetical big trip that they have been thinking through. Ayanna said “if we don’t get engaged in the next year, this should be our next big trip but if we do, honeymoon”. They moved onto discussing how to get their families in town for a post honeymoon dinner and ended up choosing a wedding and reception date together. Once a hypothetical date for the hypothetical wedding had been agreed upon (not the date we ended up with), Chris rationed that if a date has been set and a honeymoon destination chosen, plans to move in together moving forward (slowly), and the love and commitment is plainly there, surely they should be considered engaged rather than "engaged to be engaged". Ayanna needed a few minutes to process but after a bit of negotiation, they came into alignment that they were in fact engaged. At the end of the day, Chris brought them into alignment just by knowing exactly when to offer pushback and when to offer space. This is one of Ayanna’s favorite small, everyday things about being in a relationship with Chris.