A long expected party

We met way back in 2016 when neither of us were looking for something serious, much less a long distance relationship... but neither of us had ever clicked with someone else so well and so fast before, and we decided there was something worth pursuing despite the 180 miles between us. Thankfully we listened to our gut instinct, because three states, eight years, and many moving boxes later we have a beautiful home and life we have built together. We can't wait to celebrate this long expected wedding with all our friends and family; we hope you'll join us in reveling in life, love, chance meetings, and the stories created along the way.

If any of you know Darren, you will know he is shockingly bad at lying. Like, would lose all his money in a poker game bad. Yet somehow, despite us picking a ring out together and being CCed on the same email chain, he was able to surprise me with the proposal, all because of a clerical error. He received an email from the ring company saying it wouldn't be ready for another month, told me as much, and the next day got an email informing him the ring had been shipped (this he kept to himself). The ring was due to arrive on a Monday while he was at work and because it needed to be signed for, someone had to be at home to receive the package. By some stroke of fate our friend Shannon had Mondays off at the time, and intercepted the ring before I came home and could see it. Somehow they not only managed to keep the secret, but convinced me that the ring would not be here for a while yet, and that there was no way he'd be able to propose on our upcoming trip. ... Picture this: it is a humid July day in the Hudson Valley, your cranky girlfriend (soon to be fiancé), has been incessantly anxious about PA school and you have only barely convinced her to come along on a "spontaneous" weekend trip in between one clinical rotation and the next. Your Airbnb turns out to be in a haunted church, with a graveyard in the back and everything. There is a waterfall you planned to propose next to, but it isn't actually accessible by foot, so you have moved on to plan B which is a surprisingly fancy botanical garden in the town next over. There is a ring in your pocket and you are now only waiting for the right moment to propose. ... The right moment turned out to be Darren saying, "Hey, let's take a picture!" and propping his phone up on a bench, leaning on the garden map he had folded into a makeshift tripod. The humidity was causing the paper to collapse, and the phone wasn't wanting to stay in one place. Eager to keep moving, I tried to get Darren to head to the next part of the garden as he insisted on trying for one more picture. This picture turned out to secretly be a video. Darren gets down on one knee, holds up the wrong half of the box, and my jaw hits the ground. The whole thing happens in a blur, it is chaotic and heartfelt and perfectly us.