We are so excited to celebrate with you!

I guess it all began with two mutual swipes right. I was on break at work and had a message on Tinder from this cute guy asking me what yoga pose I was doing in one of my pictures. Naturally, I had to correct him and inform him that I was a dancer... Not a yogi. We began to talk and get to know each other. We bonded over a mutual love for the outdoors and how overrated some of the "cool" hangout spots were in our area. Eventually, I opened up over the recent loss of my grandfather to cancer and how my father also had cancer when I was younger. Our first "date" ended up being the Cabarrus County Relay for Life when I (more or less) said "hey, this is where I am going to be. If you want to join me, cool." We spent hours afterwards at Starbucks talking. So much so, I remember him texting his friends that he was going to be late... more than once (Sorry, y'all know who you are). I knew in that moment that Mark was a special kind of guy. To miss the usual weekend fun, to spend time with a girl at a family friendly event and then to continue to miss time with his friends to get to know her better. -Nicole

On the second day of a much needed vacation in 2020, Nicole and I were going on our first hike out in the mountains around Breckenridge. Initially we tried to get to the spruce creek road trail for Mohawk Lakes, but got stopped by some icy and steep roads. Instead, we ended up at the Hoosier Pass Loop trail (THANK GOD). This trail was still tough in the snow, but had amazing views the entire time and turned out to be very manageable compared to the other trails. About 1 mile up, we stopped and Nicole started taking photos of the mountains and I said I would grab some beef jerky out of the bag. Meanwhile, I took the ring out of my pocket and waited on a knee for her to turn around. As she did, I asked her to marry me and she seemed confused for a half second. Later I found out she was wondering where the beef jerky bag was. After that half second, she smiled and said yes. She had a couple of tears in her eyes and was obviously surprised. Nicole had to pull me up off my knee and we kissed and hugged. We blissfully continued along the trail, finding a potential wedding spot on the Hoosier Ridge Line. -Mark

We have always joked that we had a "meet"-aversary (April 28th) and a dating anniversary (September 8th). This is mostly because I gave Mark a little grief over how he asked me to be his girlfriend. We were sitting at Rhino Deli and talking about some upcoming weekend plans and he said to me that hypothetically if his friends also liked me, I guess that would make me his girlfriend. Reality is, somewhere between the end of April 2018 and early September, we had already made that level of commitment, it just never had been verbalized till that moment. When April 2019 rolled around and Mark was preparing to celebrate a year of dating, I teased him that he had not asked me to be his girlfriend in April and that he had to wait another four months. One of the first things Mark said to me after I said yes was that we would now have three anniversaries to celebrate. Here's to adding October, 27th to the many reasons to celebrate. -Nicole