When people ask this question, I usually say, “would you like to hear the real story or the story I like to tell people?” Haha. I’ll start with the real story - Jonathan and I met through an app. A swipe right on his end, a swipe right on mine and we were matched. I don’t remember much from our initial conversations on the app, but I do remember he didn’t waste much time before asking to go get ice cream and I withheld my number from him for awhile, lol. Probably a week after talking, we met up for ice cream and then, we got together again a week or so later. More dates, taking walks together, and just a lot of time getting to know each other and on October 13th, Jonathan asked me to be his girl. Now, the story I “like to tell people”, but rarely do. When we first started talking, he told me he was in the process of buying a home. 2-3 months into our relationship, he had never been to my house or know where I lived besides probably knowing the city of Cottondale. One Friday afternoon, I was coming home from work and I saw him walking from one of the new homes in the neighborhood back to his car. Mhmmm…suspicious, right?! Totally kidding! But turns out, him and his realtor were checking out the home. Obviously as this point he knew that I lived in the neighborhood. A few weeks later, the home he was checking out was his. I joke that I may have been the motivation behind him choosing that home. So, there we were…boyfriend and girlfriend turned neighbors, haha.

This is my favorite story to tell yet, but also where do I even begin?! I’ll keep it *kinda* short with just the night of, but the week and a half leading up is a whole thing, too. We had talked about getting married for awhile and knew that we wanted to be engaged by the end of 2022. Jonathan and I had been looking at rings and mid-October I found the one I liked. He didn’t order it that night, but we were told it would take 4-6 weeks to come in once it was ordered. Okay, cool...4-6 weeks from this point and not knowing if and when he ordered the ring, I wasn’t expecting anything until December. Jonathan and I had been together for 13 months on November 13th. That night he said something like, “Maybe we can celebrate next weekend”. The week goes on and no official plans had been made or at least not mentioned to me. On the 16th, I had gotten my nails done with a friend and after the persistence from her and J about getting them done, I had a slight feeling something was up, but also thought, “there’s no way…the ring takes 4-6 weeks to come in!” On Saturday, the 19th Jonathan was pretty set on us going for a walk. Me? Not so much…it was cold! He came over with flowers and I took a little extra time getting ready because by this point, I knew something was going on. Once I was ready, we got in the car and headed to the Riverwalk. We took a short walk to the end of the path and before we turned around I made some comment about coming to the end and turning around. Jonathan then says, “I thought we could go a little further” I forreal thought we were about to go into the woods! He then followed it up with, “…in life. We’ve talked about it, but there’s been one missing element.” He then got down on one knee and asked me to marry him! We walked back to the pavilion and we were greeted by our friends in family. It still feels like a dream, but it was one of the best and most special day yet!