I told my soldiers while we deployed in Kuwait in 2016 not to do anything stupid, like fall in love. I didn't take my own advice. Carl and I met while working together in Kuwait. He was stationed there for a year and I was on a 9 month deployment with my Army National Guard unit. Our work sections shared a building so we had a combined Christmas party. That night we sat around in a group and all talked and laughed and felt a bit less lonely about being away from family during the holidays. We started talking a bit more and he'd invite me to hang out. We'd grab dinner, text or chat at work and soon, spend most of our time together. When it was time for him to leave, about a month before I was due back to the US, we realized that we had something extraordinary and worth trying to figure out when we got back. We scheduled a visit for him to meet my friends and family in August of 2017. Those were the most wonderful 3 weeks (2 he came to me and I wasn't ready for it to end, so I went to Texas). By Christmas, I traveled to California to meet his family and children and we were talking about the future. We knew our journey would be long and difficult and that we wouldn't be able to predict when we'd finally get to be together, but we both agreed it was worth whatever it took. He proposed April 17th, 2018. By June he was deployed to Iraq and by September I was living in Israel for work. Once again, we fought hard to make it work and kept our faith that we'd be together. After he returned from deployment, he came to visit me in Israel and we received the news that would make our life together possible: he was on orders to Ft. Belvoir, Virginia and I was getting promoted into a position at the Pentagon. Our patience was finally rewarded and in August 2019 we were finally together.

Planning a wedding was harder than I thought it would be and the more I planned the less I felt like our wedding represented us. So we changed things up! We are pretty much eloping and sharing our wedding day with a very few close family and friends. But we wanted to celebrate with everyone who loves us and supported us, so planned a couple events just for that!