During my freshman year welcome week at Michigan State, I met Kate, who quickly became my best friend. She invited me to a house party of friends she went to high school with. That night I met Jacob standing next to the beer pong table. We bonded over our love for sports, family and traveling. We talked for what felt like hours and I left that night having a crush on Jacob, but not knowing when I would connect with him again. The following Monday, Jacob sat next to me in our 300 person lecture hall. From that day forward, we spent a lot of time studying, at tailgates, at basketball games, and dates around East Lansing. In the following months, our friend groups merged and we met each other’s families. After Jacob graduated from MSU, we started 5 years of long distance. We balanced school/work, family and our friends well, as we enjoyed our independence. We looked at long distance as an opportunity to explore Milwaukee, Holland, Kalmazoo, Grand Rapids and Chicago. Fast forward 7 years later, we moved into our first apartment together in Chicago. During that time, we supported each other through tough exam weeks, career changes, difficult medical diagnoses, challenging family times, loss of family members and big moves. We find joy in hosting our friends, exploring new restaurants, traveling the world and cherishing memories with our families. We are so excited to build on this foundation as we go in to our marriage!!

Em and I first met when she showed up to my college house on Gunson Street during the first few days of my junior year. She happened to be neighbors with Kate in the dorms and, of course, us small-town Otsegoans stuck together in East Lansing. Thanks to fate for making the whole meeting part easy on me, as we immediately sparked an interest in each other, and thanks to the excuse of Brody Hall being closer to our lecture hall than my house for giving us a couple of times each week to get to know each other. A handful of tailgates/football games and a freezing cold Izzone Campout later, I finally decided it was time to keep her around for good. We spent countless hours studying together (safe to say she was typically working a bit harder than I was), frequented the East Lansing HopCat, checked in on each other during shifts at the Dairy Store and IM East and quickly spent our first holiday together on what felt like an abandoned campus for Easter (sorry, mom and dad). From there, it was on to a few years of long-distance that forced us to grow both together and individually. We checked out essentially all of the breweries that Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo and Colorado Springs had to offer before Em joined me in Chicago after PT school. We are loving our little sliver of Lake Michigan we see every day out our windows in the Gold Coast and continue to push through the winters to enjoy the awesome Chicago summers (kidding, kind of). I couldn’t be more thankful to finally be creating our own little home together and can’t wait to see what life continues to have in store for us.