Dylan and Whitney both attended MSUM at the same time. Whitney had a habit of parking on campus in zones that required a parking pass. Dylan (aka Judy Hops) wrote her more than one parking ticket at MSUM. Whitney also got locked out of her friend’s apartment one night and Dylan came to their rescue. But they didn’t hit it off until later.

There were no parking tickets involved this time. For about a year leading up to this day, Nick and Alexis had been casually mentioning Dylan and Whitney to each other. It had almost worked once or twice for us to have met sooner but for whatever reason it didn’t. On this night, Whitney was maybe supposed to be studying for an upcoming clinical skills exam but it was still 4 days away, so when Alexis asked if she wanted to go to dinner with them and that friend she kept mentioning, she accepted. Nick picked up Dylan from the Philadelphia airport, and said “Hey, so you remember that girl I was telling you about? Yeah, we’re going to dinner with her tonight.” Dylan was not exactly thrilled because he was mildly against dating somebody still in school and somebody who lived 1200 miles away at the time. Despite all of that, they went to a sports bar called Yardhouse for dinner and had a wonderful time, and decided to meet for coffee the next day.

After Whitney flew home for semester break in May 2022, they went on a few dates in Minnesota, notably meeting a few times in the middle in Alexandria, MN. Then after she had been back to class for a few weeks, Dylan flew out to see her and to experience the Jersey Shore for the first time. While they were at the beach, they swam out into the ocean a little bit and Dylan officially asked Whitney to be his girlfriend and she accepted.

For one of Whitney’s clinical rotations, she had the opportunity to see patients at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, HI. She spent three months there learning all about eye care on a military base. For the last weeks, Dylan flew into visit and spend some time with her in Hawaii. They spent a day hiking & snorkeling and then went to the Alohilani Resort. The next day, they took a UTV tour of where they filmed Jurassic Park and it was torrentially downpouring. Then, they were going to go to a beach and it was still raining. Then, they went on an absolutely gorgeous sunset cruise on a catamaran, but there were a lot of people around, so Dylan waited to propose until we got back to the resort where he popped the question in our room that was overlooking the ocean. Then, we went out to celebrate and ran into a pack of Hulk Hogans since it was the weekend before Halloween.