Ryan and I were mutual friends with a couple from ECU who decided we would be perfect together. After months of trying to get us to meet, they finally gave up trying to get us together...or so we thought. On July 4th, 2018, I thought I was getting picked up to go to my friend's pool to spend the day with her. Instead, I was picked up by her and her boyfriend, and they didn't tell me where we were going. When we finally got to our destination (a house I didn't know), they announced that this was Ryan's parent's house, and we were there to use the pool as a group of 4 to celebrate the day. That day, we finally met after months of these two trying to bring us together... in his parent's kitchen. Throughout the day, we realized we had the same sense of humor and outlook on life and later ended the day watching fireworks at the Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary. Since that day, we have spent every day laughing and enjoying small moments with each other.

We always celebrate our relationship on the 4th of July weekend because that is the day we met and never separated! This year, we were thinking of ways to celebrate five years without doing something too crazy, so we settled on dinner one night near our condo. When it came to the night of the dinner, it was blazing hot and going to storm. We went out for drinks, and his head was clearly somewhere else. We went to dinner at the fantastic restaurant Little Bull in Downtown Durham. After dinner, we returned to our condo to grab an umbrella, and Ryan wanted to exchange his gift with me before we went out for dessert. He told me he had hidden the present in our truck parked below, so we walked to the garage. As we walked around the corner to where the truck was parked, a 1971 Volkswagen Super Beetle, my dream car, sat in our spot instead. Very excited and overwhelmed about the car, we walked around it, and he popped open the ‘frunk’ where he played the first song we ever danced to on July 4th, 2018, John Pardi's Rainy Nights, and told me that the present wasn't over. From there, he dropped to one knee and proposed. It started to rain at this point, just like the night we first said " I love you" to each other. Afterward, he told me that he figured I couldn't say no after seeing the car and the ring.