We’re getting married!

In summer 2017, my friend Abe told me about a local Dungeons & Dragons group that meets on Wednesday nights. I, being someone who usually runs the game rather than getting to play, jumped at the opportunity. After making our characters, we talked to some of the others coming in. The first two comments I received were, "Oh, great, ANOTHER Tiefling Warlock," and an unsolicited deluge of information about birds. After that, my new party told me about the other characters, specifically mentioning "The Murder Druid". They indicated a short woman who had just walked in with the most powerful RBF I've witnessed even to this day. She was intimidatingly attractive and had a striking Charisma that everyone else seemed very familiar with. She would later tell me that her first thought on meeting me was, "I thought you were gay. Because, y'know, your voice." A month or so later, I was convinced to run a game, and the Dungeon Masters got to divvy up the players. It was a sort of draft based on preference, and the other DM's gave told me that most of them were straight-up scared of Courtney. "I'll take her," I said. "She can't murder druid her way away from what I have planned." And so we played a game for months, the details of which you either know or wouldn't find interesting. Our group eventually segued into having board game nights and Mario Kart competitions, events which Courtney helpfully invited herself to even after she stopped being able to make it to D&D. After one such night, Courtney was the last person to leave. We went on a long, meandering walk from my condo to a Sonic, where we had to call an Uber. After a long conversation during this perambulation, she ultimately had to ask me out for a date at Outback Steakhouse. It just had not occurred to me that she might be romantically interested in me. I was late to this date, because knowing that the plan was to play Mario Kart afterward, I had tried to clean my bathroom, inadvertently staining everything blue, an excuse that Courtney is still skeptical of today. And so, following our first date in November 2019, we looked for every opportunity to spend more time together. This was greatly facilitated by the pandemic in March 2020. To my utter and complete shock, spending this much time with me did not help Courtney realize that I am insufferable. We watched The Thing and other horror movies, beat every BioShock game, played D&D online, watched The Thing again, came to rely on and hate DoorDash like Gollum with the ring, got into Krav Maga, and watched The Thing 3 more times before all was said and done. In the end, we came to the conclusion that we should live together all the time because of love and devotion and stuff, but mostly because Courtney hates doing the dishes and I don't mind. Last year, I decided to get conspicuously into Lord of the Rings. I watched the 6/10 HBO show, reread all 3 books, and started rattling off bits of trivia at every opportunity. It made sense that in the midst of all this, I may as well get a Lord of the Rings tabletop game, and a Lord of the Rings cookbook, and start planning a game with our friends from the game store. On September 22nd, the day Frodo and Sam began their journey together, I gathered my friends and had them traverse my lore-accurate map in order to find an inscrutable object of power to deliver to Tom Bombadil so that he could present it to his wife, Goldberry. This was, of course, an elaborate and analogistic setup for me to present Courtney with a ring of her own. Now all we need to do is get the government involved in the relationship, and we hope to have some fun in the process. If you're reading this, congratulations! You're invited. Come celebrate with us and commemorate the conclusion of 6 years of living in sin.