I love you and I Like you

Some of you reading this knew me before I met Todd. Some of you have known me since I was a little girl, and others met me in college or my early 20s. Some of you knew Todd first and we met along the way. If you want to know more, keep reading as I entertain you with the story of the life we've built together based on love, coffee, and shenanigans.

So for those of you unfamiliar with how we met, the short version is, we met on eHarmony. Here is the longer version: By late spring and early summer of 2017 I was kind of done with dating for a bit. I was happy and enjoying my life. I was almost a year in to living in my own place for the first time. I graduated grad school. Life was good, but little did I know that it was about to get better. I wasn’t checking my eHarmony profile much by then. My account had been up for a little over a year, but I decided to let the subscription run out. One day while I was scrolling through my “what if” matches this cute guy caught my eye. I scrolled through his pictures and remember thinking his puppy was adorable. Reading through his profile I realized we had several things in common; we both loved Star Wars, dogs, and baseball. I sent him a quick message and went about my day. Two weeks later while I was in Colorado with my family on vacation I got a notification on my phone saying, “Todd responded to your message.” My first thought was, “Who is Todd?” It had been so long since I initially messaged him that I quite honestly had forgotten about it. A quick look at his profile before I responded and I immediately remembered. I messaged him back, and it didn’t take more than 48 hours before we moved our conversation off eHarmony and started texting back and forth. From the very beginning talking to him was effortless. Within a few days we knew we wanted to meet in person so I asked him when he was going to fly out and see me. (At this point he lived in Florida and I was in KC; so 1100 miles apart.) This was early in July, and we decided he’d fly out and stay for five days at the end of July between summer school and when the fall semester started.

We met for the first time in person three weeks after we started talking. He was flying in from Florida and staying with me for five days. You may be reading this and thinking we were crazy for staying together when we’d never met in person, but I could just feel from the beginning that this was different. I always felt at ease and comfortable with him. I was giddy with anticipation as I picked him up from the airport in the middle of the afternoon. He was even cuter in person than his pictures. All I could think about while I was driving back downtown was how all I wanted to do was kiss him. We had our first kiss sitting in my car in the parking garage before I went back into work. I had a few things to finish up before we took off for our first date, so he explored downtown KC. For our first date we went to Grinders in the Crossroads and then to a Randy Houser concert. Grinders is still one of our favorite places to go together for date night. During that trip, we also explored the World War I Museum, adventured around KC, and Todd met my dad and sisters for the first time as we celebrated my dad’s birthday. I went to Florida to visit for the first time the last weekend of August. Since the school year had just started Todd couldn’t take any time off which meant I spent a lot of time with his mom during the day. We had a lot of fun together. She and I are very similar which provides endless ways for me to tease Todd. I’m very thankful that we share a good relationship. While I was in Florida I met all the people closest and most important to Todd. Halfway through the trip, I was sitting on his bed while he kept walking in and out of the room working on something and I asked him, “so now that I’ve met all the people important to you does this mean I get to call you my boyfriend?” His response is still funny to reflect on. He said, “Well I would sure hope so.” And that’s how we made our relationship official.

Those of you that know me well will not be surprised when you hear that I was the first one to say “I love you,” and those of you that know Todd well will not be surprised that he did not say it back right away. I said it in a text as part of another comment one night, knowing he probably wasn’t ready to say it back and then didn’t say it again until he did. It took him almost another month to tell me he loved me, but I still remember that we were standing in the kitchen in Florida when he said it. We dated long distance for almost a year. Todd relocated to Kansas City in June 2018 and started a new career in law enforcement. He’s been a cop full time now since February 2019, and I couldn’t be more proud of him. We moved into our first place together in June 2019 and adopted a chocolate lab puppy we named Maggie in July when she was 8 weeks old (we also have a 2 y/o black lab named Sydney). This last year together has seen us walking through significant health scares and devastating familial loss. (More details on this in a post on my blog.) I have known since a few months into dating that Todd was the person I wanted to spend my life with, but 2019 was a year that reaffirmed I want to be his wife and how blessed I am he's my partner.

I still laugh a little bit when I regale people with the story of how Todd proposed. It was September 22, 2019. A Sunday morning. It was raining outside and we were on our way out the door for church. When he drives we usually go out the front door since his Explorer doesn’t fit in the garage, but this particular day we decided to go out through the basement and garage since it was raining. We get downstairs and he stops by the gun safe. Now this isn’t usual when we leave the house so I’m waiting off to the side a few feet away from him. As I’m waiting he says, “Before we go I need to do something.” I didn’t think much of it at first because I just assumed he forgot something he needed upstairs, and we were running a few minutes early. When he stepped away from the gun safe he had a ring box in his hand. It took me a minute to realize what was happening because I was in shock. I started crying and laughing almost immediately. He took a couple steps toward me and asked, “Do you still want to do this?” I remember nodding and pulling him in for a kiss. He assures me I did in fact give him verbal confirmation I accepted his proposal. After our kiss ended he said, “So do you want to put this [ring] on or just leave it in the box?” Obviously I wanted to wear it. He slipped the ring on my finger and out the door we went for church.

We have settled in to life together and what that looks like for us in this season where we’re working opposite schedules, and Todd is picking up a lot of overtime. We’re in the thick of wedding planning, although most of the big stuff is done. We have chosen to do a small ceremony with just immediate family on May 4, 2020. Yes, Star Wars day. And yes, that is intentional. There will be a larger reception to celebrate with extended family and friends in October 2020. We’re so excited, and can’t wait for this next chapter of our love story.