Arrival Time: 4:30pm Ceremony Time: 5pm Venue Address: 8225 Ibis Blvd. West Palm Beach, FL 33412

To fully appreciate the one-in-a-trillion chance of how I met Mike, I first need to explain how I met one of my best friends and Maids of Honor, Caitlin. Caitlin and I met in a shitposting group on Facebook dedicated to poking fun at low-quality mobile game ads. We met through a "where's everybody from" post, which led to us realizing we lived only about an hour apart. We became fast friends with one of our favorite activities being attending concerts together. Separately, Caitlin also started talking to Mike in the group, and they became friends as well. In 2019, one of my other best friends and lovely bridesmaids, Sam, was hosting a concert made up of local bands for her birthday. She said she wanted exposure for the bands, and it was open invitation. Naturally, I asked Caitlin if she wanted to go with me. She said yes, but informed me that one of her friends from the same group we had met in was staying overnight in town due to car trouble with nothing to do. She asked if she could invite him too. It was open invitation, so I gladly said yes. I met up with Caitlin outside the venue that night, and she told me that Mike was parking and would join us any moment. I don't remember what we were talking about, but I remember her saying something like "Oh, there he is." and pointing down the street. I turned to look at him as I'd turn to look at anyone I was meeting for the first time, but to say this time was different would be an understatement. I'm not really a love at first sight kind of person - and that's still not what I would call the feeling I had in that moment - but I did know that I had never seen eyes like that or a smile like that or felt so at ease when being approached by anyone before. I don't have an adequate word for what I felt when I first met him, but I knew before he even opened his mouth to say "hi" that he was special. At the time, he was fresh out of a serious relationship and I was still in one that I was trying to drum up the courage to end, so neither of us were looking for anything romantic or sexual. I got to know Mike a little that night. He told me that he was from Boston, he was moving to Florida where his parents had retired to, and explained how he was staying in New Jersey overnight because he was having car troubles that were getting looked at it the morning. Thinking that our hangout would be a one-time, impromptu kind of thing, Caitlin, Mike, and I ended up hanging out in his hotel room all night, sharing drinks and playing Cards Against Humanity. The next day when he left with everthing he owned crammed into his unreliable but pretty 2013 Scion FRS, it was hard for me to say goodbye in a way I'd never felt before. I didn't know why I didn't want him to go so badly, but I was absolutely gutted that he couldn't stick around. It didn't take long or very much of me talking about him for Caitlin to very straightforwardly tell me to my face that she could tell I liked him. I asked her what made her think that, said we were just friends, and laughed it off. She told me she knew I liked him because I acted entirely too normal around him, which isn't somthing I tend to do unless I really want to impress someone. I told her I wasn't trying to act any kind of way, but deep down I knew she was right. And once I realized it, all those feelings I couldn't put a name to made sense. But he lived 1,200 miles away, so what was even going to come of it? After a year of almost exclusively online friendship, we cemented that those romantic feelings were mutal, and he came up to visit for his birthday/Halloweekend. He asked me out on his birthday, and after just over a year of long distance dating, I packed my entire life into a rented Dodge Grand Caravan, and we moved in together in Florida. Fast forward two more years, and he asked me to marry him on our 3 year anniversary. And now, this May 4th, I get to start spending forever with the man who I met because of a shitposting group on Facebook.