The Summer of Love It was June 2021 in Washington, DC. Vaccines were rolling out. Crowded bars felt novel. Tequila shots were delicious. Sebastian and I both graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and now lived a 10-minute walk from each other, though it took a rooftop pregame before karaoke night for us to cross paths. I thought Seb was a cute granola boy (mostly accurate). He thought I was a sorority girl (inaccurate, no offense taken). We kept orbiting each other at parties and quickly discovered shared loves in peak-season tomatoes, PBR, and night walks. He wooed me with catfish sliders on his patio and coffees on the stoop until we could no longer tolerate a casual relationship, and started dating a month before I was set to move to Atlanta. One Particularly Cold Winter Three months later, I moved back to DC for a job at Hilton (a story for another time), while Sebastian was living his childhood dream as a line cook at The Dabney. My boxes were still unopened in my Dupont studio when I had a major health emergency. Seb traded his early mornings baking bread for nights in my hospital bed. Everything that winter bonded us quickly. He started a new job and took sales calls from my (abnormally large) closet. We decided we’d get married one day. Spring in the City We took a leap in 2023 and signed a lease in Williamsburg with four other roommates. The theater kid in me had always dreamed of living in New York, and Sebastian was starting a new career in the city. The move gave him the space to launch a supper club out of our apartment. Between paella parties, corporate dinners, and tasting menus, we started traveling together — Mexico, Portugal, Morocco, Canada. Our Google search history ranged from the life cycle of house flies to how to rebuild a fence to the unsolvable mysteries of shared bathrooms to "onigiri near me." It was a busy, stretching, sometimes challenging season of shedding the more comfortable ways of living. An Eternal Fall Day Moving into our own place in Park Slope was like rediscovering Norah Jones. There was an immediate stillness to life, paired with the high of building something that was fully ours — we merged our book collections, explored brownstone-lined streets, found our favorite neighborhood espresso. In February 2025, Sebastian proposed in Mexico City with our best friends by our side, which was the best weekend of our lives (until September 2026, that is). These days, we find ourselves giddy about the future and deeply grateful for the community we’ve built together, and we can’t wait to celebrate with you.