Our story began simply by the luck of fate in 2018. Nicole was a freshman in college and Ryan was a senior in high school #cougaralert. One fall day, Nicole, her roommate Quinn, and a friend at the time, all got together for pizza and tequi......I mean soda....and decided that we simply had too much food and drink for just 3 people, and that we should meet some new friends! At the time, the popular thing to do was to post your address/location on a public Snapchat story for people to know where the parties were at. Completely safe, right? Lucky for us, we had 4 gentlemen, complete strangers, who were also living in the same dorm stop by and hang out with us. Two of the guys went to Middleton High School and Nicole said, "I think I know someone from there but I am not sure who. I feel like I have a screenshot of someone from there though." Low and behold, it was a screenshot of Ryan's Instagram post from a swim meet earlier that year. Roman, one of the guys, mentioned that him and Ryan played football together and talked about how nice of a guy he was. Mind you, Nicole and Ryan have never once spoken to each other. It is still a mystery as to why Nicole had a screenshot of Ryan already. Nothing much happened after that, but the friendship with the guys continued to grow, and a few months later, Roman had posted on his Snapchat story a video of Nicole and her friends dancing and singing in their dorm. Ryan slid up on Roman's story and mentioned how "the girl with the sunglasses is really cute!" That girl was Nicole. Roman told Nicole what had happened and Nicole immediately got giddy and added Ryan on Snapchat. Nicole then posted a video of Roman and his friends on HER story, and that is when she got a notification that "Ryan is typing...." of course she couldn't open it right away, she wasn't THAT desperate. So she waited approximately 3 minutes. With a half-swipe, she saw Ryan responded to her story about how he knew Roman and from there, conversation never ran dry. The rest is history!

Our first date was dinner at Ian's Pizza in Downtown Madison with Insomnia Cookies to follow, as well as a nice walk around the Capital! We then saw a horror movie. After the movie was over, we talked about life and everything else in the car for over 2 hours. The conversation kept flowing naturally, almost like we've known each other for longer.