We met at a mutual friend's birthday dinner sophomore year of college. A friend of mine knew Rusty would be at the party and had me watch Courageous a few days beforehand so I could see him in the movie. I totally forgot though, because after I met him, I pulled my friend aside and asked her why he looked so familiar!

After our initial meeting, we saw each other a few times with friends. Then we started running into each other on campus. We formed a pretty fast friendship. When one of my friends started hanging out with him regularly, I got "jealous" (though I didn't recognize it at the time) and purposely started hanging out with him more. Then he began showing up at my dorm on a somewhat regular basis. Sometime around the end of sophomore year, Rusty invited me to meet him at a coffee shop to study. I thought he meant me and him and some friends, but it was just the two of us. We ended up hanging out for hours. That was our first real date, though we didn't think of it that way. That summer, he invited me to go to the beach with him over Memorial Day weekend. Again, I thought there would several people with us and that we were just going as friends. But I was mistaken. We had our first kiss there on Topsail Island. All of our friends said it was bound to happen (we had fantastic chemistry) but we were the last to figure it out!

A month before I graduated, Rusty popped the question in Angie's, our favorite breakfast spot. He totally surprised me. We had been talking about getting engaged, but I thought he was going to do it that weekend since he had suggested a random beach trip and a friend had invited me to get my nails done. However, he discovered that I was suspicious and moved the proposal up a few days. I remember sitting, still sleepy-eyed, at breakfast and totally missing the partially-concealed excitement of the waitresses. And when he got up and told the restaurant how much he loved me, I remember thinking how sweet he was. But I didn't really know what was happening until he pulled the ring box out and got down on his knees. I was so excited, I couldn't eat after that.