We're getting married!

We met online in the depths of the pandemic. Tom's first message was about how we both did college debate, and we realized we had both judged British Parliamentary Debating tournaments in China, and that Charlotte had studied abroad in the same small Chinese city where Tom lived for four years. We had our our first 'date' via zoom and accidentally talked until 2 am, and then did the same thing every night for a week. We had so many things in common -- both of us grew up cross country ski racing, we both have been on many backpacking adventures, and we even had many of the same books on our bookshelves. We decided we needed to meet in person, and after much quarantining and testing, we had our first in-person date. We couldn't stay apart after that and have been together ever since!

Due to various covid precautions related to our living situations, it was difficult to find a place to see each other at all. Fortunately Tom's friends Sam and Dan needed a cat sitter for the weekend so we ended up using their apartment as a place to meet. Obviously dining out was not really an option at this time, so we cooked a five course dinner in the apartment and dressed up, pretending like we were at a fancy restaurant. It was extremely cute, just the right level of dorky and earnest, and that dinner is when we decided to be officially 'dating'. For his proposal, Tom recreated the dinner in Dan and Sam's apartment, down to the exact menu items from our first dinner. He surprised Charlotte with flowers, candles, champagne, and a beautiful ring! She said yes of course.