happily ever after

If you only need to know one thing about me, I'm a planner. Everything down to the minute detail and I'm all over it. I like when things run on schedule and when it all stays on the rails as it were. That being said, even I couldn't plan this. In November of 2017, Marissa came back into my life through what I'm sure she thought was an innocent "Happy Birthday" Facebook post on my wall. That turned into dinners and going to see movies together, turned into me tagging along while running errands with Lindsey in tow because I'm sure the phrase "I can't go alone with Nick! I don't want him to think we're a thing!" was uttered. We've had some history. A similar group of friends after high school kept us in contact, and there were even a few summers of will-they-wont-they romance that would makes seasoned sitcom writers roll their eyes. But I let Marissa go then in hopes of finding something better, not realizing that I'd already found the best there is. This most recent chance was something I was not going to let go of again! Maybe 6 weeks in, I knew she was the one, I'd dreamt of the reason we're all here reading this page now, I was going to marry this girl. So I set myself a plan of how this was going to go, came up with a timeline of how I wanted it to all go. The best laid plans of mice and men they say... Within a year, Marissa and I were buying our first home together, filling it with love and making our first memories within our new found lives together. Then came Truly, who at the time of writing this is our spunky 8 month old goldendoodle that we got after Marissa begged and begged me to get. Once I finally said yes, it seems as though I blinked and we had a dog. We're now 100% off script, but I wouldn't have it any other way. So welcome friends to the story of us, to the book that wont ever be finished... Nick

If you’d’ve told 17 year old me that I’d be planning a wedding with Nick Colling, I probably would’ve laughed at you. When we met, Nick was dating one of my good friends, but it never crossed my mind that we might one day spend the rest of our lives together. Fast forward through the next couple years, because Nick already told you about our will-they-wont-they summers. But, it was during this time that I had entertained the idea of dating Nick. I specifically remember asking Jill what she thought of him after letting her peruse his Facebook profile. We became close friends during those summers and had a really great time, but that was it, just summer. Nick always went back to Grand Valley thinking there was something better out there (insert eye roll emoji here). We’d stay connected through social media and get together here and there but nothing ever panned out. Little did I know, that one of these times we would get together and there would be no separating us again. You could’ve told that 26 year old me that Nick and I would be planning a wedding and a future together and I probably would’ve STILL laughed at you, because Nick is correct in fact that I told my sister that I didn’t want him to think we were a thing. The universe has bigger plans for all of us though. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I didn’t want to share my time with anyone else. Nick may tell you that I turned his world upside down or derailed all of his plans, but you can’t tell me that he doesn’t deserve every minute of it for stringing me along for literally years. I wouldn’t change a single minute of our story though. There’s so many moments that we can look back and say “if we’d have known then what we know now”. From each of those moments, we learned more, grew more, and were slowing becoming the perfect match for the other. I look forward to a lifetime of “improving” Nick’s plans and spending every day with my best friend. Marissa