We're looking forward to celebrating with you!

For every couple, there are places that hold special meaning. For us, The Bearded Lady is one of those places. The Bearded Lady is a bar on South Main Street in Fort Worth (although when we met, it was on Magnolia). It's where we first met in January of 2017. Tom was about to start on his Master's degree at TCU, which Rachel had started the previous semester. Most of the graduate students thought it would be fun to get together somewhere with good food and beer the night before the semester started. It didn't take long for us to notice each other and start up a conversation. We hit it off pretty well- we were both doing ecology-based thesis research. Turns out that people working in similar fields tend to have similar interests, and we developed a fast friendship that quickly evolved into mutual attraction. We returned to The Bearded Lady for our first date on March 19, 2017 (although neither of us was certain if the other thought it was a date until Tom offered to pay for dinner). Apart from a hiatus when they moved to their current location, The Bearded Lady's grilled cheeses and burgers of the month have kept us coming back nearly every month since then- and their beer list certainly hasn't hurt either. It's easily one of our favorite places to eat, drink, and be merry in Fort Worth. When we first got engaged, we knew without hesitation that we wanted our engagement pictures to feature this important fixture of our relationship.

Due to current circumstances, we have elected to get married at a small ceremony with immediate family in October 2020. However, we intend to have a vow renewal ceremony and reception as we initially intended on October 9, 2021. We hope that you will join us!

We made the decision to get legally married on October 9, 2020 at the Tarrant County courthouse in downtown Fort Worth, Texas. Specifically, we got married at exactly 2:12 pm.

Although it wasn't what we initially planned, October 11th, 2020 will always be a very special day in our lives. In the presence of our immediate family, we got married at the Alenius' family home in Fort Worth, Texas. View our wedding video here: https://vimeo.com/468767522 View our wedding ceremony here: https://vimeo.com/468982946/2869f66d17 (password: tomandrachel20)