Zach and Mariah met on a dating app called Hinge. Zach thought Mariah was hot stuff and commented on her messaging prompt that indicated she liked to race to beat the time that the Waze driving app would predict for her arrival time at a destination. Mariah in turn took a crack at Zach’s two truths and a lie message prompt, incorrectly guessing that the lie was that he didn’t speak Spanish. Zach then cleverly slid into Mariah’s DMs by insisting that he needed her number to show her how he produced music and the chase was on!

Zach and Mariah met up at the Roaring Fork in Austin, TX for their first date. Zach had learned that Mariah had recently watched a movie called My Spy, so he decided to watch the movie before the date so they would have something to talk about. That ended up mattering very little as they found out that they had an unexpected amount of things in common, to the point that the waiter had to come back three different times to ask if they would like to order food (they are quite sure that the waiter was annoyed by this but he was at least a good sport about it). They ended up closing the restaurant down but they didn’t want the date to end, so they went to a local bar and proceeded to also close that place down! Still not wanting the night to end, Zach decided to lay all of the cards on the line and took Mariah on a tour of the local neighborhoods around his apartment complex. The neighborhoods were lit up for Christmas, and Zach decided to adopt an old-time radio announcer voice and effect to provide her with a neighborhood tour that she would never forget. Unbelievably, this ended up working out and earned Zach additional dates.

After spending the year travel nursing, Zach and Mariah decided to return back to Austin in order to be closer to family. They decided to buy a house and quickly learned that home buying process is much more complicated (and unnecessarily stressful) than they had anticipated! However, they found an incredible realtor named Jessee who was able to guide them through the process (10/10 would recommend). They flew and drove back to Austin multiple times from North Carolina to secure their future jobs and in November 2022 they closed on their first house!

With the house secured, there was only one thing left for Zach to do- propose to Mariah! Zach worked out a plan with the staff of Roaring Fork to make the night special (that included using Microsoft Paint, PowerPoint and a voiceover program). On that drizzly night in September, Mariah agreed to marry Zach and they once again closed down the restaurant while celebrating.