Braden and Shelby met in 2012 at Whittier College in English 120. After remaining friends for two years, Shelby told Braden that she wanted to be more than friends weeks before Braden’s graduation. They’ve been together since, but, unfortunately, not side-by-side. After graduating in May of 2013, he moved to New Mexico to work for Hewlett-Packard and shared an apartment with his brother, Austen. Shelby and Braden made the distance work until a few months after her graduation in May 2014. In February 2015, Braden flew out to California and helped to pack up Shelby’s Jetta. After strategically balancing everything she owned from her parent’s house into her car, Braden and Shelby drove from Laguna Niguel, CA to Albuquerque, NM. They learned they love to cook together and were passionate about their work. They learned they prefer to watch a movie at home than go to out to the theatre and can spend all their energy competitively throwing a frisbee back and forth. They also learned that there wasn’t anything they wanted to do without each other. After moving to Colorado in 2016, traveling to Portugal with Braden’s mom and brother, and experiencing a multitude of good days and bad days, they decided they should be forever. On April 10th, 2019, after being together for six years and twenty some days, Braden followed Shelby to her job on a Wednesday morning. She parked and he parked, attempting to go unnoticed. Well, Shelby walked right past him until he called out to get her attention. He was holding her computer mouse as a guise for why he had shown up in her work parking lot, but Shelby was suspicious as to why there was a phone in a tripod on the ground behind them. With hands shaking more than she’d ever seen, Braden said that he didn’t want to wait another day looking for the perfect moment, so he got down on one knee on the damp asphalt and proposed, making that the perfect moment.