So here’s the story of how we met... we were both preparing to enlist in the Marine Corps. It just so happened that we had the same recruiter, Staff Sergeant Nakano, and he asked me if I could help tutor some guys who were getting ready to take the ASVAB test. I wasn’t gonna be mean and say no haha so I showed up to the tutoring session and there was Jordan. We started meeting just about every day after work to study and eventually one thing lead to another and we were on our first date :) When we first met, neither one of us expected that we would end up married. We were just so focused on preparing ourselves for the Marine Corps. While I helped Jordan with studying, he helped me workout and get physically into shape (God and everyone else knows I needed all the help I could get haha). I truly think that our differences brought us closer together and we learn a lot from each other’s strengths. Lots of love, Starr

It was the night before I was supposed to ship out to bootcamp. I was going to be gone for months and as excited as I was, I was also really sad to be leaving Jordan. We had only known each other for about three months at this point and I had no idea where our relationship was going to go when I left. That day, Jordan picked me up and drove us to downtown Fort Worth because he wanted to show me the water gardens that would light up at night. Sadly, when we got there, the water was shut off and there were no lights haha. We still tried to make the best of it. As we were walking around downtown, I was teasing Jordan about how “unromantic” he was and he must have taken that as a challenge to show me that he could be very romantic. There was a hotel across the street with tall windows that allowed us to see into the lobby. Since the holidays were close, the hotel was decorated with lots of lights, candles, and there was even a fireplace going. An old timey song was playing over the speaker in the lobby that we could also hear outside the hotel. Jordan pulled me across the street and there we were, slow dancing outside a random hotel downtown, at 1 am. I started laughing at how ridiculous we probably looked and Jordan said I was ruining the moment. He then started picking leaves up off the ground and throwing them in the air around me. There was also a branch, that had a few leaves still on it, and he gave it to me as a “flower bouquet.” For the rest of that night I carried that branch of leaves :) We have some pictures from that night that you can see on our photos page!