Have you ever seen the show How I Met Your Mother? Well if you have, you might think our story sounds a bit like a Barney Stinson pick up scenario. It was about three years ago when Ryan and I first met, I gave him a haircut, which he never payed me for.. two years late we were dating! It may actually be a little bit more complicated than that, but who doesn't like a good sitcom reference.

Ryan and I had talked about starting our lives together for a long time... but we knew we couldn't move forward until I came back from Africa, and graduated (which was my specification). I had been stateside for about a month, was newly graduated and ready to take on what came next when Ryan told me about a mysterious date he had planned. A date that would take all day, required my passport and a classy outfit, that's all he would say. We spent a large part of the day in traffic singing to oldies and a lot of Ed Sheeran to arrive Toronto just in time to see Phantom. The show was amazing but I was very distracted, I knew what was coming, and I was freaking out. I planned what I would say, wondered if I would cry (Spoiler: I didn't but was close, same with Ryan), and talked myself in and out of whether it was really happening. After the show, and more traffic, we made it back to Ontario, had dinner and went to see the falls while recounting one of our all time favorite dates from the summer before in Canada. Still nervously excited, knowing it had to be coming, I was hoping there wasn't a secret photographer tracking us or cluster of friends and family waiting to pop out from behind a tree or something. We eventually made our way over to the botanical gardens overlooking the falls where we talked about life, our time together and eventually something I had told Ryan when we had first started talking. He said "there's something you told me, that I'll never forget. You told me if any guy took you to see Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, you'd just have to marry him... Well, I held up my end of the bargain. Will you marry me?" In case you're wondering, I said yes and that's what all this hullabaloo is about. To be exact, I said "Yes, a thousand times yes." For anyone who knows Ryan well, or at all, you know that he had to make a joke here and ask "Only a thousand times?"