I had just moved back to Chattanooga from Atlanta GA in March of 2022 a month prior to meeting Matthew. I told all my friends I was moving back there to "find my husband" I also told my sister to be on the lookout for eligible bachelors for me as she was working in a male dominated field at the time. I get a text on 4/22/22 from my sister asking if it was ok if she gave a guy my number, with a picture she had sneaked real quick (of the back of his head lol) and it said, red head, blue collar guy and bald headed. I replied sure give him my number. We ended up talking on the phone later that day and made plans to meet the following week. After we met I realised he lived in Georgia, where I had literally just moved from. We started having lunch time car dates due to him living 2 hours away so the only time to see him was during his short lunch breaks, so I would make lunch and meet him on his job site. It was so different from all the dates I had been on before, things just felt so natural like we’d known each other forever. He wasn’t overly trying to impress me like past dates, and was very much what you see is what you get which I loved. Matthew ended up asking me to officially be his girlfriend 3 months later on 7/17/22

I knew Matthew was going to get ready to propose because I happened upon a email from the jewelers from months before. He also is horrible at being sneaky and had "casually" mentioned that we should take a walk on the beach by ourselves in the Bahamas when we were going to be there on vacation and we should get a photographer to do a beach shoot. I was like definitely not suspicious by any means, because how often does a man ever suggest taking a photoshoot on the beach. I started telling my friends that I was certain he was going to propose in the Bahamas. Well little to my knowledge they told him that I had caught on to his plan and that he needed to come up with something else that would throw me off so I could be surprised. We already had a trip to Ashville NC planned to take photos in a poppy field the week before our Bahamas trip and I was so focused on the following week of what I had figured out was going to be his proposal date that I missed all the signs of him acting suspicious on our way down there. As we were taking our sunset photos he stops in the middle and says he was thirsty and needed water from the truck, to which I told the photographer I was so sorry that he's so random and waited for him to come back, we started taking photos again and next thing you know Matthew is on his knee and i'm still totally not catching on to what is going on, i'm embarrassed and telling him to get up because this is not the time to be joking around and realized he has a ring, meanwhile i'm there in denial and i'm telling him no no this is supposed to be happening next weekend. Typical me trying to tell him when he was supposed to propose in the middle of his proposal lol. He definitely surprised me with the smooth move on his part switching the proposal date to throw me off and I will never forget our magical proposal in a field of poppy flowers which is 10x better than I could have ever imagined.