The year was 2006. George W. was in the White House, Donald Trump was on the set of The Apprentice, and MySpace reigned over Facebook. MySpace was the most popular social network at the time and it’s where we met in the winter of 2006. A couple short months later during the Super Bowl Nick asked Raelyn to be his girlfriend. We aren’t the biggest sports fans but Super Bowl Sunday has always been a special event for us since then.

While the road to boyfriend-girlfriend status may have been short, the road to husband-wife status was a long time in the making – over twelve years, in fact. During that time, Rae graduated high school and college, we loved and lost our fur baby Mike Jones, adopted our new fur baby Penny, and bought and renovated a townhome. We even went to prom together. It wasn’t our prom, per se, because neither of us were students at Bartlett High School at the time, but we went by pretending to be the dates of our friends. There we had our first slow dance together to the tune of Aerosmith’s I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing… and we haven’t missed a thing in each other’s lives over these past twelve years.

Fast forward to the proposal – June 9, 2019. Nick woke up and thought today was the day. He asked Raelyn to go ring shopping and together they picked out the perfect ring. When the ring was ready, Nick kept it a secret and made plans to do a real proposal – he even had a camera set up to capture the moment… but Rae “ruined everything” by coming home early from work.

Now our wedding is just months away and we’re enjoying planning a fun and casual wedding that feels like us, at a beautiful venue called Mora Farm. We have an exciting honeymoon abroad planned – we’ll be staying in a castle in Ireland, standing under the Eiffel Tower in Paris, exploring beautiful landscapes in Switzerland, and searching for the best pizza (Nick) and gelato (Rae) in Italy! We hope our honeymoon will be the first of many adventures in our future together as Mr. and Mrs. Novak.