How We Met
Alison and I first met on a dance floor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in April 2012. Alison was out celebrating the birthday of her closest friend, Kevin, when I received a text from a mutual friend Matthew to come join their party at Cameo Gallery.
I vividly remember seeing Alison for the very first time. Short-hair, beautiful eyes, clearly having a great time — I was immediately attracted. But when we were first introduced I thought the guy standing next to her was her boyfriend. It wasn’t until Alison approached me a few hours later that I found out he wasn’t (though not for lack of trying).
I’ll never forget our first real exchange:
[Alison dances up, non-chalant] “What was your name again?”
[Me, surprised and now smiling] “Dan”
[Alison, taking a bold turn] “I think you’re cute.”
That’s all it took. Fast-forward a few days and we’re on our first real date at a restaurant in Brooklyn Heights. Fast-forward three years and we’re getting engaged in Iceland.
how they asked
The trick with getting engaged in Iceland is that there is no shortage of beautiful places to ask. There are waterfalls, glaciers, black-sand beaches, green mountain-ranges, hour-long sunsets — it’s hard to go wrong. When Alison and I had set out on a 10-day trip around the country, it wasn’t until the morning of the third day that I finally worked up the nerve to propose and that’s mostly because of analysis-paralysis from me trying to find the “right” place.
There was the time where I almost asked at Seljalandsfoss (where we have some of our engagement photos), but I thought there were too many people around.
Later that day, we found puffins at dusk at Vik — one of the happiest moments of Alison’s life — but it had also gotten pretty dark and kind of cloudy so it suddenly seemed like a poor choice. And really no one wants their engagement upstaged by puffins.
About an hour after my second cop-out, I finally had a breakthrough. Alison had brought a Go-Pro on our trip which can take ‘bursts’ of photos — basically like taking a video — which meant I could trick her into documenting our whole engagement. The next morning while we were driving, I asked her if she wanted to pull off the road to take a photo together and she agreed.
After she set up the tripod and camera, she ran into the frame and I nervously got down on one knee. “Oh, are we doing this now?” she asked (she really had no clue it was coming). One short monologue and a “Will you marry me?” later she said yes.
