We eloped on October 31, 2023! Come celebrate on November 2, 2024 in New Orleans.

The odds are pretty good that if you know Allison and I, we’ve probably shared our story with you at least once. It’s equally as probable that, if you know us, our story seems particularly off-brand for who we are as people. (You might agree.) Consider for a moment: if you really know us, do we seem like the type of people who actually want a story like ours? How ridiculous do you think we feel when we have to tell people that we’ve loved each other since middle school, that fate brought us back together after twenty years apart, and now we’re happily married? Not content with merely sounding like lazy fiction penned by a hack writer, it has the compounding audacity to be an unabashedly sweet, heartfelt story, too. The issue is that it’s all true. Every word of it. It might come as a surprise to you, but neither Allison nor I had very many friends when we were growing up. This troubled the adults in our lives, so, in lieu of sending us to therapy, they decided to stick us two weird kids together. Normally, this doesn't always work, but, in our case, it was unexpectedly successful. Every day, on AOL Instant Messenger, Allison and I would talk to each other for hours, constantly trying to outdo each other’s absurdist non-sequiturs with even dumber, more idiotic quips. Without knowing it, we were shaping each other’s personalities, interests, and humor; we were creating the people we needed most in our lives: each other. We were in love. Unfortunately, this story, like all stories, required some conflict to keep it interesting. You didn’t think we’d start dating each other in middle school, marry after graduating high school and go off to college together, did you? That would’ve been too easy. I had to respect her parents’ rules and wait until she was 16 before I could ask her to be my girlfriend. No one knew my feelings for Allison, and it was then that I realized that I would have to carry this silent burden alone. Throughout the years, Allison and I would keep in touch with one another, periodically checking in on our childhood crush. She was studying medicine, I was absolutely riddled with undiagnosed ADHD. She moved to Wisconsin, I’d married my first wife on the Northshore. Separated by 1,036 miles, we unknowingly shared the private thought that it was silly to still have feelings for that person from all those years ago, or to admit that they were the standard by which we had measured all of our relationships. The majority of 2019 was a pretty awful year for me for a number of reasons, so let’s skip ahead to July when I finally gave in and re-entered the dating market after my divorce. Since I had last been single, dating apps had proliferated and completely changed how people dated. After a few weeks of harrowing online dating, I’d very nearly decided to give the whole thing up until I saw something I didn’t expect to see: Allison Cormier, on Bumble, dressed as David Bowie, living in New Orleans. Surely it wasn’t her. The last I’d seen, she was living in Wisconsin. Was she still with that really tall guy? There was no way it was her. It was her. On July 24th, 2019, at the Hot Tin rooftop bar at the Ponchartrain Hotel, Allison Cormier walked back into my life, actually taking my breath away when she entered the room. I was finally going on a date with the girl that I’d loved for over twenty years. You know the rest: we survived a pandemic, bought a house, got some dogs, eloped on October 31, 2023, and so on. You get it. Even now, it would still be a safe presumption that this is a made-up story, a complete farce, but I assure you that it isn’t. I am one of those people that you hear about who married their lifelong love. You can take that off your list. You’re welcome. Come to our party. - John Stephens