WE'RE GETTING MARRIED!

It was spring semester, junior year and Jonathan and Grace were both enrolled in Vladis Pipiras' Probability course (MATH 535). Grace was chatting with her friend, Holden, about the class and Holden mentioned she knew someone in the class named Jonathan who was really smart and might be down to form a study group with her. Next class, Grace looked Jonathan up on Facebook and scanned the room of around 40 students trying to find the face that matched Jonathan's profile picture. She found him sitting in the 3rd row, walked up, introduced herself, sat down next to him, and asked for his number so they could study together. Jonathan was quite nervous by this brazen introduction and was hesitant to give Grace his number because he thought she was trying to use him to get answers to the homework. However, he ended up giving her his number and aren't we glad he did! They began studying together twice a week for the rest of the semester and officially started dating that summer.

Like all good stories, this one starts with fried chicken. It was Friday afternoon and I had schemed up a plan to convince Grace we needed to leave work early to grab dinner from a local fried chicken restaurant in Seattle (which totally checked out... of course we needed to leave work early for that). Little did Grace know, I had organized for her roommate Bella to pack a bag and instead we were actually headed out on a weekend adventure. As you may know, not much gets past Grace, so we barely made it out of the parking garage and she knew something was up (I may have forgotten to turn off the navigation that said we were 3 hours away from our destination). We made our way to the ferry across the Puget Sound and ultimately to Whiskey Creek Beach on the Olympic Peninsula. Along the way Grace wondered where we were going and when the proposal was going to happen, and I was nervously thinking about what words I could possibly use to convince her to marry me. I was also nervous because we were cutting it very close to missing sunset and I had arranged for our Airbnb host to meet us at a specific place to capture the moment. Luckily we made it in time, and quickly checked into our cabin and I told Grace that we were going for a walk along the beach. As we walked along the rocks with the sun setting behind the Canadian mountains, we reminisced about our relationship and how far we had come since meeting in Chapel Hill. When we arrived at the water's edge I pulled out the ring and got on one knee and asked Grace if she would marry me. Retrospectively, Grace told me I was so nervous I wasn't making a lot of sense, but to us it didn't matter and she happily said yes. Thankfully, we had some time for the nerves to subside and as we watched the sun slip behind the horizon, I read Grace a letter I wrote describing why I wanted to marry her. We spent the rest of the weekend enjoying God's creation hiking and admiring the Olympic National Park and our cozy beach cabin.