The date was May 29th, 2023. The setting is Uptown Normal, Illinois – A small downtown area with cute shops, located close to Campustown for Illinois State University, but it’s the summer, so the students are all home! I am recovering from the end of the school year, coaching, and working full time as an attorney. Simi is a law student, working on an internship at State Farm. It’s Memorial Day, so we both have the day off and set a time to meet up for our exciting first date! I arrived at a parking lot to wait for Simi. She arrived just after me, got out, and began *power walking* towards the coffee shop. I texted her, telling her (in hindsight, quite creepily) that I was behind her! She turned a corner, checked her phone, I rounded the corner, almost ran into her, said “Simi?” and, as one does on a first date, she extended her hand for a handshake! I tell that story to everyone, and really, what cements an excellent date better than a good firm networking handshake? NOTHING, I TELL YOU! All jokes aside, it was truly an excellent date. First, we discovered that neither of us liked coffee, so the coffee shop we went to, locally famous for truly excellent coffee, got an exciting order of tea and hot chocolate out of us! After we sat in the coffee shop for about an hour and a half, slowly drinking our beverages and chatting, we both decided that we’d rather have something we both liked, so we made our way next door to a local ice cream shop. Fast forward another 2-3 hours (you read that right), and we decided that a 4-5 hour first date was probably long enough that we could both be confident we’d get a second date. After that first week, I am pretty sure we spent more waking hours together than alone. The next weekend, Simi came over to my condo, prepared with the shopping list I had planned out earlier that week, and we meal prepped enough food to feed both of us for approximately 2 months (slight exaggeration justified here). We were both getting along very well! We were having a lot of fun together on simple dates. Going to the park, cooking, taking walks, watching movies (of which nearly half the date was agreeing on the movie). The takeaway here – the dates were easy. I don’t mean that we weren’t putting in effort, but I mean that we didn’t have to work to find things to do that we wanted badly enough to see each other. I mean that we literally didn’t have plans, found out we were both planless, and would organically pick something that we’d enjoy and hang out. We still scheduled dates, but over 90% of the “dates” we went on that month were “planned” less than 24 hours in advance! That first month was enough for me to say that I had truly found my person.

Two years later (technically, two years minus 4 days for the surprise factor, but that doesn’t sound nearly as romantic. I’ve ruined it with this parenthetical. Why are you still reading my parentheticals??), while on our second vacation together as a couple, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, along the shore of Lake Superior, I proposed with a beautiful princess cut diamond ring for MY Princess to become a Queen. Now, if you ask me what day was the best day of my life, it would be easy to say that the best day of my life was the day I proposed (she did say yes – see this is another one of those parentheticals you shouldn’t have read). But was the day I proposed better than the day I first met my favorite person? My response? Why can’t I pick both? They’re both beautiful for different reasons, but they both involve Simi and I together, taking steps in our relationship. And if that’s the criteria for my favorite day, then I’m in luck, because every day in my foreseeable future just got nominated. I am excited for our wedding, I am excited for our honeymoon, but most of all, I am excited for our life together, and isn’t that what all this is about? Thank you all for coming to our website, to our wedding, or even just sending us a “Congrats” text – You all mean the world to us (but not quite as much as we mean to each other), and from the bottom of our hearts, thank you for being with us, however you can be, on our wedding day! – A.J. Blodgett Groom (the “don’t read the parentheticals guy”) (but then why did you write them?) (who can say)