Aaron and I met in 1998. I was five, he was six. He thought I was annoying and I thought he was weird. He told me that if you stick up your middle finger you’re saying hi in Chinese. I decided to try it out on the lunch ladies. It didn’t go so well. He was a year ahead of me in school, but we both went to Kittredge then Nessacus then Wahconah. He was salutatorian of his class and I distinctly remember sitting with the rest of the the high school band watching him give his speech. If you told me that he was my future husband, I would have laughed. I was going to marry a musician, after all, not a rocket scientist. In September of 2021, while scrolling through the dating app Hinge, a familiar face popped up. He had gotten rid of the famous Durkee 'fro so I was finally able to see just how cute his face is. I didn’t think he would remember me, even after we matched, until he said, “How have you been? I always thought you were pretty.” Gotta say, best pickup line ever. Our first date was a casual Netflix and chill (and, no, that is not a code for anything, we actually watched half of the first season of Schitt's Creek). I think I was in a bit of a self sabotaging mood because I spent a good chunk of time telling him all of the reasons he shouldn't date me: I was in the middle of getting a master's degree, I worked 50 hour weeks, I had five cats and a dog, hated doing the dishes . . . But, luckily, he didn't listen. The invisible string theory states that you have met your soulmate long before you realized it, but, even as I am typing this, the bio for our WEDDING website, I still have a hard time believing that I met my soulmate when I was five years old. Aaron isn't a spiritual person, and he definitely pokes fun at me when I say some Higher Power must have known that we couldn't really be introduced until the right time, but connected us early anyway. I cannot wait to marry him, even if he does teach our future children "how to say hi in Chinese."