Freshmen year of college is new, exhilarating, and exhausting. You expect to enter a new and scary world that's filled with strangers and potential friends. What you don’t expect is to come in on day one and one of those strangers be, not only a potential friend, but also the love of your life. As the cliché movie trope goes, we didn’t realize the gold we had struck right away. At Birmingham-Southern College, on the first day of freshman orientation, we were introduced to each other and then eagerly set out on our first adventure. We headed up to the school EcoScape, home of the school’s gardens and infamous treehouse that we had heard so much about. He went up the ladder first, and as I peered up above me while he climbed, I had no idea that I was peering up into my future. As the year took off, our closeness waned, and eventually we lost time for our adventures. Although we remained friends, a year had passed before mutual friends brought us close together yet again, but only close enough to watch each other lose ourselves in other people. We saw each other struggle, succeed, and struggle some more (a common sight in college). We watched temporary SO’s come and go and new friendships roll away with the months. He watched my heart break more than once and I watched him break hearts that I always knew were wrong for him. We were silently there for each other, never knowing that the other one wished for the silence to end. It took two years for that silence to break, and two months thereafter to know that my heart would never break again. Soon enough we found ourselves back in the treehouse, only this time, it was me who went first up the ladder and him who peered up at not his future, but his present. With a small candle and some heartfelt notes from John Mayor, it is there that I said yes to the love of my life.

Everything changed after March 9th, 2017. I was no longer the super independent guy that I used to be. I found myself always angling to be with the girl that I would later find out would be the last girl I would ever date. Tiffany became one of the most important things in my life and the reason was pretty simple: she made me feel like the luckiest guy in the world (mind the cliché). We had been good friends for about two years before we started dating and this friendship translated almost immediately into a month of dating that felt like a year. We practically spent all of our time together and stayed up talking all night, every night. The more time we spent together the more time we wanted to spend together and it wasn't long before I knew that I loved her. The night that I asked Tiffany to marry me was not planned and I definitely wasn't expecting it. I was sure that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her and I could feel that she felt the same about me. Even though I did not have a ring and we were in a rickety old treehouse with nothing but a candle to see with, the time could not have felt more perfect to ask her if she would change her last name for me.