One sticky summer night in 2005, we met at a house party in Brooklyn. Jason’s college friend Brian was throwing a housewarming party (thanks Brian!) and invited his coworker Sarah, who asked her college friend Gemma to join her (thanks Sarah!). We hit it off immediately, thanks in no small part to our friends serving as impromptu wingpeople and a brilliant, mutually assured destruction bet over a piece of music trivia suggested by Gemma: loser has to buy a bottle of cheap champagne for us to share. Jason technically won the bet, because Gemma didn’t yet know how much Jason knew about the musical artist Meat Loaf, but when it comes to drinking cheap champagne, everyone wins. A few days later Gemma bought the champagne and Jason wore his sexiest Hawaiian shirt (as if there’s any other kind) and we met up in Bryant Park. And from then on it was smooth sailing. Just kidding! We dated for a while, broke up for a while longer (you’re supposed to make bad choices in your 20s), stayed close throughout, and eventually ended up going to graduate school together to study arts journalism. We still don’t agree on which of us followed the other to scenic Syracuse. In 2012, Gemma moved back to Seattle, her hometown. In 2016, Jason took a job with Sundance Film Festival and moved to Salt Lake City, which is much closer to Seattle than New York City, and a long-distance relationship was (re)born. In early 2020, when Covid sent us all working from home, Jason moved to Seattle. It was supposed to just be for a couple weeks while this whole pandemic thing blew over, but he never left. Over the years together we’ve driven thousands of road-trip miles, traveled all across the country and some of the world, seen hundreds of movies and plays, written countless words about arts and culture (we both actually used that degree!), grown up a lot, continued to discover new amazing things about each other, and learned how to love each other better than our 22-year-old selves could have imagined. Jason gets up to make coffee (nearly) every morning, even though Jason does not drink coffee. Gemma happily listens to Meat Loaf and overlooks the fact that Jason does not drink coffee, even though it’s weird. We drink slightly better champagne now. We’re both so lucky to have families we adore and friends we couldn’t live without, and we’re so happy and grateful to have you with us as we finally get married, 18 years to the day after we met at that house party. It was worth the wait.