2300 E Ocean Blvd, Long Beach, CA 90803

Tim and I first met at La Serna High School, during our theater department's spring musical production of Ragtime. We met through mutual friends (looking at you, Keenan) but did not become close until the following fall semester. It was my junior year and Tim's senior year. We were in a production of Urinetown and happened to be in a lot of scenes together. I was honestly intimidated by Tim at first. He was a senior and a veteran theater kid. He was so funny and sardonic, clearly very smart, and a talented actor; he just always seemed to know what he was doing. I will always remember how proud I felt the first time I made him laugh. I have no idea what I said, but I can clearly remember thinking, "Wow, I made Tim Sutton laugh!". Little did I know that I would still feel that joyful pride over 10 years later. And that it really wasn't all that hard to make him laugh. A simple fart joke will do. We became good friends as the production went on. The layers of humor and irony began to fall away and underneath was a kid who was scared of all the same things that I was scared of. Scared of not fitting in, being in the spotlight, scared of failure. Slowly but surely, we began to confide our fears and took turns reassuring each other. He was patient, kind, and gave sweet, comforting hugs. We both felt there was something different about our friendship. It would take some time but we eventually went on our first date in April 2009. We saw I Love You, Man and talked for hours at Starbucks. We had come to realize just how happy we made each other feel, without any compromises, while being our true selves. But I think we knew that deep down from the very beginning. Tim asked me to be his girlfriend over Facebook Chat (ha!) after our third date on May 11, 2009. Nine years and seven months later, on January 30, 2019, Tim asked me to marry him, once again over Facebook Chat. And thanks to the pandemic, we got married on May 11, 2020, on our 11th dating anniversary.