We were at the same Bible study group for the first time. We were never actually introduced to each other directly, but that's the night we met. Over the next few weeks, we formed a sort of silent friendship at this Bible study. After the next few weeks, we both realized that we liked our friendship more than only getting to hang out once a week.

"Hey, I was just wondering if you would like to hangout and do something sometime next week?" The first message exchanged between us. That day, we talked about climbing trees, traveling the world, The Chronicles of Narnia, tattoos, and how much we're looking forward to the day when the world knows Jesus. We also forgot to make plans to see each other. We realized this the next day, and didn't wait for the next week - we saw each other that afternoon. For four hours, we played board games, climbed trees, and played card games.

We were just friends. We didn't want more than that and we weren't looking for more than that. But, at some point our friendship wasn't just a friendship. There wasn't a single moment that suddenly pronounced us as being in a relationship, although we were. We were with friends one night when one of them asked about when our anniversary is. We didn't have an answer. We still don't have a real answer, but we decided that October 25ᵗʰ would work because we liked how the numbers look together. 10-25-20

For quite some time, it was things like "I 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲, 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 like you," or "I like you 𝐬𝐨, 𝐬𝐨, 𝐬𝐨, 𝐬𝐨 much," or "I like you 𝐚 𝐥𝐨𝐭, 𝐚 𝐥𝐨𝐭, 𝐚 𝐥𝐨𝐭" Sometimes it was even agreeing with a 'you know you love me' comment. But it did finally happen. "I'm pretty sure I love you." "I'm pretty sure I love you, too. I love you! love you! I love you!"

We got each other matching promise rings. Both of the first rings we got each other ended up with issues. The stone fell out of her ring a few weeks after receiving it, so she ended up wearing a ring that belonged to his mom that he had given her about a year before. His ring was too small, so she ended up wearing that ring as well and replacing his ring.

We had a plan. We both planned the proposal together. We decided to pull an admittedly terrible (decoy) prank on everyone at our Bible study. She was going propose to him in a lighthearted, joking manner while everyone was downstairs hanging out before we started the Bible study. He was going to seriously reject me in front of everybody and make everyone hate him and feel bad for her. We were going to sit on opposite sides of the room and avoid each other the rest of the night until the very end when he would actually propose to her revealing that the entire thing had been a joke. Things didn't end up going that way because she had a panic attack earlier in the day and was feeling too overwhelmed to be downstairs with everyone. When we got upstairs, she tried to tell him she would fake propose now, but he said that we just weren't going to do it tonight and there would be no proposals at all. Joke, prank, or the real thing. But, little did she know, his plan was never to actually go through with the prank at all. We ended up with an opportunity to leave just a little early, so we did. When we got downstairs, we had to wait for a few minutes and that's when he proposed her. In the very spot she first saw him. We ended up going back upstairs and our friend and pastor got to announce to everyone that we were now engaged to be married.

March 21ˢᵗ, 2024 We picked our wedding date because we're nerdy about numbers. Cleary. Some of our earliest conversations were about math and 3D sudoku puzzles. He taught her both binary and hexadecimal coding the first time we hung out. We picked our "anniversary" because of how the numbers looked together. And she even had his promise ring engraved with a hexadecimal code. It's both easy to remember and nerdy: Literally Three-Two-One and 3+21=24 which is the year we will be getting married.