He’s ten minutes late, Jenessa thought with her hands clutched tight around her phone. She had been patiently waiting in the corner of a coffee shop and just as she contemplated taking a rain check, a frazzled boy with a patchy beard and frozen hair slid through the door and scanned the room through foggy glasses. He recognized her from her picture at Periscope’s open house. “Jenessa, right?” Katherine, Jenessa’s friend and coworker, had connected her with this student looking to break into advertising. It was Valentine’s Day, but that was surely just a coincidence. And now there they were; he, stumbling through his portfolio, getting tripped up by her deep eye contact; and her, smiling through the pain of pretending to like the worst portfolio she’d seen. Within 15 minutes, it became clear that there was little interest in work and a lot of interest in each other. After several weeks of non-flirtatious flirtatious texting and “run-ins” at industry events, Jeannie convinced Jenessa to cross the imaginary line of professionalism and just ask him out. “Eff it, the worst he could say is no.” When Jenessa sent the text hinting that Sam owed her a beer, he did not even wait a whole minute before suggesting a time and date. They paraded around 7th Street in St. Paul, on a first date that would last nine hours and culminate in their first kiss. Throughout that first year, their relationship blossomed through moped tours of St. Paul, comedy shows in Minneapolis and weekends at O'Shaughnessy Stadium. Then in the spring of 2020, COVID hit and nights out in the cities turned into walks wearing masks and holding a hockey stick (how very Minnesotan). Spring turned to summer and the 25 miles from Chanhassen to Minneapolis started to feel like 200 miles, so they moved in together with Jeannie and Danny. For a year, they all passed the time doing tequila tastings at home, edutaintional slideshow presentations, playing pond hockey and maxing out the home WiFi. Then, in October 2021, they made their best-worst decision: moving to sunny Los Angeles but driving all their stuff out there themselves. The five days it took to traverse west – stopping in Nebraska, Colorado, Utah and Nevada – allowed them to see many different sides of the country and themselves. Between COVID and moving, only a year had passed, but it felt like ten. Cut to three years later, Jenessa and Sam, and their friends Molly and Pat were sifting through a rich person’s clothes at an estate sale in Beverly Hills, when Molly suggested they check out a nearby botanical garden. They wandered around the grounds awestruck by the beauty hidden in their city. Pictures were taken. Turtles were fed. And when they finally got to the long, tree-lined walk that was the focal point of the estate, Sam said ‘some nice words about the moon and the stars, or something’ (Jenessa’s direct account of the moment) and proposed. In February of 2025, Jenessa and Sam celebrated six years since that first meeting in a coffee shop. If you would’ve told them that that harmless informational interview wasn’t for a job, but for finding a life partner who would share the same wild, whacky sense of humor, push each other to experience new things, to see the world, and to make each other the best versions of themselves – Sam would’ve definitely been on time.