It was July of 2017 at a not-so-quaint bar called Bovine & Barley. Three of my best friends and I were downtown for a standard girls’ Saturday night out. When two of my friends, Julia and Katie, ran into some old classmates, Morgan and I politely peeled off from the large group to (inconspicuously) seem a little more approachable. Not that either of us really believed we would meet an eligible guy in a bar. We were talking and laughing next to a weird but poetic wall quote by Edgar Allen Poe when I noticed two guys lingering nearby. After a minute, maybe, Ryan and his friend Jake decided to take their shot and approached us. Ryan, suave conversationalist that he is, disregarded conventional pickup lines and swooped in with a comment about our matching purses… which, frankly, weren’t matching at all. It was different, funny, and endearing, and I've never stopped making fun of him for it. As we began bantering, there was a spark, and we felt a connection that neither of us had experienced before in a random bar encounter. We both knew that there was something special about each other that we couldn't ignore. Our first date was two weeks later.

We made a trip up to NYC to visit my best friend Anna. While I thought I was planning the itinerary with her, she and Ryan were secretly orchestrating the proposal, with help from our families back home. That Saturday morning, Ryan took me for a stroll on the Brooklyn Bridge while Anna followed and discreetly photographed us. After saying some sweet and romantic things that I didn't know were part of a proposal speech, Ryan stopped, got down on one knee, and asked me to marry him. I was surprised but didn't hesitate. He says his knee barely hit the ground before I said yes.