Amber and I first met working together when I moved to Flagstaff for college at Northern Arizona University after high school in 2013. In the beginning, it was strictly work. Hellos. Goodbyes. Laughter. It all stayed at work. After a while, it started to move beyond just work. Amber started to occasionally give me car rides back to my dorm, as all I had the time was a bike to get around. Car rides turned into nights out with coworkers, and that is pretty much where it stayed until I moved to Prescott. I moved to Prescott in 2015, transferring from NAU to Embry-Riddle. It wasn’t until I moved out of Flagstaff that I realized what I had left behind. Amber. Throughout 2015 and part of 2016, both of us made regular weekend trips back and forth to either Flagstaff or Prescott. I had the timing of the drive from Prescott to Flagstaff down so well, I knew a certain album by The 1975 was the exact length of the drive, from door to door. That album still holds a certain amount of nostalgia with me, as it takes me back to late nights and early mornings in the car. In those small trips, I think we really started to find the love we share now. But through all that time, the one thing we never had was a first date. Sometime in 2016, Amber’s parents decided to leave Flagstaff and move to Phoenix. Their move meant Amber was faced with a decision to either stay in flagstaff by herself or move to Phoenix with her parents. What she actually decided to do, was move to Prescott where I was. Now, Amber will always claim she made the move to Prescott for “school”, however I think we all know deep down, it was because of me. Either way though, we were both now in Prescott. We both saw each other almost every day and grew closer as each day passed. But still no first date. Amber and I grew as close as any couple could during 2016 and 2017. Right up until I graduated from Embry-Riddle at the end of 2017. Leaving college, I only had one major job offer. It was a good one and incredibly hard to turn down. The problem was it forced me to move to Virginia. Pack up everything I had and move to the opposite side of the country. Leaving everything I knew behind. Especially Amber. It nearly broke us. Not just as a couple, but individually as well. Some of our hardest of times happened while I was in Virginia. But through those times, we managed to keep each other together, again both individually and as a couple. With weekly Facetime dates and trips back and forth as often as we could manage, we stayed together through it all. Then the pandemic started. In an unusual way, the pandemic helped us a lot. When lockdowns started to become reality, I realized I didn’t need to sit alone in my apartment to work remotely. I could work remotely from Arizona. So in April of 2020, I came back to Prescott to live with Amber and work remotely for a couple of weeks while we ride out the pandemic. A few weeks turned into several months, which turned into moving out of my Virginia apartment and back to Arizona. It wasn’t until about a year after I had permanently moved back to Arizona, that we realized I had never actually asked Amber if I could move into her condo with her. It all just happened. Once I moved back to Arizona and Amber and I started to get into a grove with living together, I think it hit me very suddenly. It was time. After several trips to Phoenix, lots of research into diamonds, and a little bit of blind luck, I had eventually found the perfect ring. June 25th, 2021 was the day. Admittedly, I didn’t do a ton of planning for the day or really the moment itself. But looking back on it, it was perfectly us. Little planned a head of time, and not much knowledge into where we are going next. It just happened. And I don’t think I would ever do it differently. In the end, we never did have a first date. But as I write this, I realize its probably okay it happened this way. Because 40, 50, 60 years down the line, this day will be the only one that matters.