We chose to elope this year because the pandemic has made it very difficult to plan a traditional wedding. Although we would love for all of our friends and family to be present, we decided to have our ceremony at San Francisco City Hall without guests to minimize the possibility of those that we love getting sick. We hope that in the next year or two, we can plan a belated reception.

We met through a Long Beach nonprofit called Power4Youth, an organization that pairs mentors with mentees from Long Beach Unified School District. As volunteers, we met each other in passing several times, but it wasn't until November 2019 that we planned our first date, just a couple of months before Power4Youth announced that they would be shutting their doors.