We're getting married!

Picture this: it's December 2017, Whitney is in Berlin, Germany with a group of college students. Jon has just moved back to Madison, Wisconsin after spending 8 years being a ski bum in Colorado. Both are looking for love on the internet. Typical. The algorithms on Hinge's app make the match and they start talking to each other. Jon is swept up by Whitney's pictures of her recent trip to Breckenridge where she did some training hikes for a friend prepping to climb Kilimanjaro, and Whitney is swooning over his rugged smirk and cute nieces. Jon mistakenly thinks Whitney's location is about 30 minutes from his home instead of 2.5 hours and so they keep talking. Two days after Whitney returns from her trip, they meet for their first date in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Jon tells family members he is going to meet a woman for coffee and should be back in a couple hours. After 3 hours, they begin to worry. After 5 hours they're ready to call the police. Total first date time, 7 hours. Meanwhile, Whitney & Jon found a great little Italian restaurant and ordered the same thing for dinner, scallops. Needless to say, the first date set the stage for what they have called "an easy love."

Jon and I did long distance, traveling every weekend between Madison and the Chicago suburbs, for just about 2 years. In August of 2019, I made the leap to leave my job after a decade and move to Wisconsin, because, why not? We moved into a 676 sq ft condo right downtown Madison just in time for the pandemic. We adopted a dog (Bess) and set in for our new little life together. Little did we know that 2020 was going to be a really hard year for our families. We lost Jon's dad to cancer in February, and my dad to heart disease in July. Both quickly and relatively unexpectedly. On top of the transition to a new city, living together, heavy grief, the pandemic, etc, we leaned into each other and our relationship during the course of the year just to survive. We were both experiencing the worst times of our lives, but together. We decided our theme word for this time of our lives was "resilience." Outside of the hard stuff, we also both became entrepreneurs. Because, again, why not? I launched a consultancy in fall of 2019 (For the Good, LLC) to work with non-profit and social impact companies. Jon launched a woodworking business (MountainSong Woodworks) after losing work due to Covid in March 2020. I now work with women entrepreneurs and Jon is now full time into cabinetry and we're thankful to have taken the risks we did at the time. Again, taking life in stride together and building it how we wanted it to look.

We had known really early on in our relationship that things were going to work out, but the timing was hard (see above). So, on February 12th, 2021, Jon made me a great dinner of risotto and scallops at home (thanks, Covid), and during a conversation reflecting on the last year without his dad, he said "I want to make good on a promise I made my dad a year ago today." He pulled out his grandmother's ring and asked me to marry him! After saying yes and smiling until our faces hurt, Jon said "I hope the ring fits!" Then he looked me in the eye, before putting it and said... "Does it fit?" (Jon had shown me the ring previously and set it on our dining room table for a few days. I work at home, alone.....you can read between the lines.) The ring, indeed, fit perfectly! :)

My favorite place in the whole world is Harsens Island, Michigan. My mom's family lived in Detroit and bought property there in the 1930s. The land has stayed in the family for 4 generations and my grandmother built a home on the lot in the early 2000s. I always said I wanted to be married there, in the front yard, on the river. The first time Jon came to the island, he fell in love. I told him my dream to get married there and that has always been the plan!