Becca and I did not meet the “old fashioned” way but I would say that we have an “old fashioned” type of relationship. We met using an online dating website, I remember clearly the first day I had found her profile and thought “yeah this won’t work but what the hell”. So I sent her a nice message expecting to get no response in return. Well later that night I received a notification that Becca had replied to my initial message. We began to talk to each other daily, I kept asking her to go out with me and she would say she had other plans (sure she did) until finally we agreed to meet for our first date on August 20, 2016. We met up halfway between where we lived at the time (I was in Charlotte, NC and she was in Duncan, SC) to go bowling. Throughout the three games that we played, we got to know each other more including that we both had a competitive nature and a love of animals which helped to tie in our second date. At the end of the night, she finally gave me her number and we set up date number two at the Columbia Riverbanks Zoo, which was where I proposed to her two years later.
I knew that I was in love with her that second date when she was feeding the giraffes and the smile she had on her face. We went to the botanical gardens and came to a fountain where we made wishes and threw pennies into the fountain and on our second date I had wished to be able to marry her one day. Fast forward two years to the day I proposed I had asked Becca’s parents to come with us to the Riverbanks Zoo. In the afternoon when we had entered the botanical gardens, we reached the same fountain where we had made wishes the first time and while she was making a wish (probably wishing for another dog or a pet horse) I got down on one knee and when she opened her eyes, I asked her to marry me.