We went to school together at FC from 2008-2010. Matt claims we met at Falcon Days, although I don’t remember that! We had some friends in common, and we hung out some, but always just as friends. We had some History classes together and even Marriage and Family too--ha!

In 2010, I went to WKU for my Master’s, and Matt went to GA Tech for his Bachelors’. We stayed in touch, and in summer 2011, I went to a weekend meeting that his church was having—lots of students were going. I texted Matt to see about getting a place for my friends and me to stay that weekend, and we pretty much kept a conversation going from that point on. In 2012, we both started teaching—Matt in Detroit, and me in Nashville, where we respectively stayed for 3 years.

Then in the summer of 2015, I moved to New York to teach, and Matt moved to Chicago to attend law school. In 2017, Matt took a job as a summer associate at a law firm in midtown—but he rented an AirBNB only a few blocks from my apartment in Harlem. He came the weekend of Memorial Day. The day he left Chicago, he explained to our good friend Haley that he was sure he would hang out with me, but—disclaimer—we were JUST friends. That Tuesday night he came to Bible study at UWM, and after Matt left, our good friend Julianne asked me, “Would you ever date Matt?” I replied, “It’s literally impossible!” Thankfully, the whole rest of the summer we proved each other wrong-- by going out on with each other as often as possible, though we never called these “dates.” Finally, I brought Matt to a wedding July 22-the first official date.

Since the week after our first date, the rest of our relationship has been long distance, with me in New York, and Matt in Chicago. We probably owe a lot of our relationship to Southwest Airlines. On May 26, one year after Matt came to work in NYC, he popped the question on the beach by Lake Michigan. I said yes (after about 5 minutes of asking "Oh my goodness, are you serious?" over and over again)!

We are so excited to both be in Houston beginning in August! Since most of our first decade as friends was spent in different states, it will be great to be together at last. Matt will be clerking for a federal judge, and I will be teaching first grade...and maybe learning to cook something besides tacos.