In the Spring of my freshman year at Ohio State, I had board game night at my friend Leslie’s house every Thursday evening. On one ~fateful~ night, her housemate Blake joined us for a game of Oregon Trail. There was nothing necessarily remarkable about our meeting; however, the next morning I got a notification that Blake added me as a connection on LinkedIn and endorsed me for multiple skills, including “Event Planning”. How the heck would he know that having known me only a few hours!? Apparently he was not trying to make any moves, but he unassumingly knew the way to this Business major’s heart. A few months later we both started leading Young Life College together and got to know one another on a deeper level. We began sharing Spotify playlists and hung out more and more. Were these “hangs” actually “dates”? Verdict is still out... Finally, in February of 2018, we started officially dating after one night I texted him in a panic that I needed to “get something off my chest”. I’m glad I did 😊

Kelly and I got engaged at a special place we visited just before she left for her New York internship in the summer of 2019. The night before, she climbed to the top of a structure overlooking some train tracks in Clintonville in the hope of escaping light pollution to look at the stars. It became a special place to us that night, tucked away from the rest of Columbus. I chose this location for that reason and because of the four pointed star design on Kelly’s ring. It was important to her that there was some element of the ring that I designed from my own inspiration. She wanted it to have an element of timelessness and delicacy in hopes that the future she could pass it on. The star seemed like the right way to link these ideas with a story from our history. The true spark that lit the match for this proposal idea comes from the song “Sparkle” by Tatsuro Yamashita; a song we enjoy in the car. The lyric “sparkle in my heart” became the message behind the ring and tied the bow on the story for me