Matt always says his first memory of me was at the AMC Theater in downtown Corvallis where we were watching Thor Ragnarok together with a mutual friend. He remembers discovering that I not only liked Milk Duds nearly as much as him, but that I also was a ridiculously big Marvel fan. My first memory of him was several months before and perhaps I cheated a little as I saw Matt on stage nearly every week at church playing one instrument or another with the worship team. I always thought he was definitely quite handsome, but it wasn't until he happened to stop and chat with me for a while one Sunday morning while I was manning the welcome booth that I thought "Wow ok, I think I might kind of like this guy..."

We disagreed for quite some time on what our technical first date was. I always said it was when I subtly asked Matt out to have pizza with me a month or so after our first true introduction at the movie theater. We had been talking for quite some time and he hadn't made any solid moves so I finally made an off handed comment about "Maybe we can hangout sometime if you ever need a break from grad school." He claimed for some time that our first date wasn't until a little while later when he asked me to go hiking with him up Mary's Peak. We have now compromised and have 2 first dates.

If there's one thing I have learned about Matt in our 2 years of knowing each other, it's that he is a strongly sentimental person. The intention of our relationship from the very beginning was aspiring to progress into marriage, so it wasn't too surprising to either of us when we started seriously discussing it. We'd been talking about marriage and engagement for quite some time and finally, a couple months before the proposal, we started actively looking at rings together. Matt took me to New York to meet the rest of his East Coast family this last summer and during our last couple days we took some time to check out a few jewelers and found some pieces we really really liked. Fast forward a couple months and I started getting a pretty strong inkling that things were going to be happening pretty soon. At first, I was sure he was going to propose when I took him up to Alaska to meet my brother in early September. But as fate would have it, the ring didn't show up in time and he had to rethink his plans. Then I thought it would happen on our first anniversary a few weeks later. But Matt knew how much I wanted to have a photographer there and waited until he could get the friend he wanted to be there for the right moment. So, the weekend after our anniversary and the day after Matt defended and passed his masters thesis (YAY!) he recreated our "first" date and took me on a hike up Mary's Peak. Matt had a couple buddies waiting for us up at the top and he got down on one knee on a grassy slope at the summit with a ring we had picked our together in New York. And then of course we had to celebrate with pizza at Dimaggio's in honor of our other "first" date!