Michael and I met at the Emory University Speech & Debate Tournament in early 2001. He was a junior and I was a sophomore. I met him through a friend I had gone to debate camp with the year prior. While at the tournament I called my friend to hang out and he put me on the phone with Michael. When I got to my friend's hotel room, he and his 3 roommates opened the door. I thought his one roommate was super cute. I asked, "Out of curiosity, who did I speak to on the phone?" I was hoping that it would be the cute one. It was! "That would be me. I'm Michael." When I got back to my room later that night I told my 3 roommates, "I think I just met the man I'm going to marry." "Yeah, suuuure you did,” my friends teasingly said to me. The debate tournament was only 3 days long. On the second day, I kept deliberately running into my friend hoping to see Michael again, but I didn't. Dejected I went to the last day of the tournament and saw my friend hanging with a bunch of his teammates. Still no Michael to be found. I resigned myself to never seeing the cute boy again. Then as I turned around, there he was. I followed my friend around that morning just so I could hang out with Michael and get to know him better. Later that afternoon, we found ourselves separated from our respective teams and ended up on the Emory University quad. We sat on a bench in the cold talking for hours before he finally leaned in and kissed me. It was and still is one of the best moments of my life. We parted ways shortly thereafter because he lived in Baltimore, MD and I lived in Wellington, FL, but we stayed in touch throughout high school. We had our first date when I went to Washington DC a year later in 2002 to look at colleges. We had our second date on May 25, 2004. The rest, as they say, is history.

In May of 2019, to celebrate our 15 year anniversary, I took Shannon to Cancun, Mexico. Months before, I’d gotten to a much better place in my life, had realized what it was that I wanted out of life and what was important to me, and decided that I wanted Shannon to be my wife, my partner for life, and my friend for-ev-VER. So I designed a ring, ordered it, and it arrived JUST in time for the trip. I hid it in my headphones case and we went to the airport. I was a bit concerned that customs might stop and look through my bag with Shannon right there, so I left them a desperate Post-It note wrapped around the ring box, begging them to "be cool and keep this hidden because my fiance is right there." Though we did get pulled aside by Mexican customs, they didn't pull out the ring box and Shannon was none the wiser. That first night, after a pretty low-key day of swimming in the resort’s pool, we were lying in the dark and I told Shannon that I wanted to talk to her about something serious. Little did I know at the time, she thought, by the tone of my voice, that I was beginning a break-up conversation! But before she had a chance to worry much at all, I got on one knee and told her that I wanted her to be my wife, and asked her to marry me. She couldn’t see any of this of course, because it was dark and planning isn’t my forte, so I flipped on the light and opened the ring box and asked again. She said yes (hence this website) and I went to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of champagne that I had brought for just the occasion. We waited 24 hours to tell all our friends and family about the engagement so we could enjoy it, just the two of us.