How We Met
Tyler and I like to tell people we met through college athletics…but the truth is we met on Tinder. My friends had insisted that I try the dating app to meet new guys. I was swiping through one day and matched with Tyler. He opened the conversation with the cheesiest pick-up line possible, “Do I know you from somewhere? Oh yeah, my dreams.” It made me laugh and we continued to talk for a few days before the conversation fizzled out and I didn’t really give him much thought. A week or so later, I was at a photo shoot for an athletics poster promoting reading literacy in schools. Everybody there had a different book they were reading on the poster – mine being about caterpillars and butterflies, while there were some books with funny titles such as “Everybody Pukes.”
About a week after the photoshoot I get a message through Tinder from Tyler asking if I was at the photoshoot last week. I was a little caught off guard by this because I had never told him I was going! He then said that he was there too and that he was the guy with the book titled “Everybody Pukes.” I laughed at this and determined that this guy must have a good sense of humor to pick that book out of the stack. We continued to talk for the next couple weeks and finally met in person on New Years Eve. I immediately felt a connection (mostly because he suggested that we ditch the party to eat leftover Christmas cookies at his place) and our love story grew from there!
how they asked
Tyler had emailed me one day out of the blue asking if I wanted to take a long weekend in San Diego. I have been to San Diego many times for Rowing in college and it is one of my favorite places so I was very excited that he suggested a long weekend trip! I was so excited about showing him around my favorite city and preoccupied planning how we were going to fit in a visit to all of my favorite restaurants in California that I missed the obvious signs that something was going to go down this weekend. We got into San Diego late Thursday night and had a few drinks at the hotel bar followed by a night time stroll on the beach before heading to bed. Friday we ate breakfast and spent the afternoon at the San Diego Zoo! One of my old teammates worked at the zoo so she was able to give us behind the scenes access and was our personal tour guide for the day! Tyler and I absolutely love going to the zoo to see all of the animals and learn more about all of the creatures on this earth. However, Tyler was acting really weird during this visit. My friend was touring us around and telling us all of this inside information about all of the animals and Tyler was lagging behind us on his phone the whole time. I was a little annoyed but didn’t think much of it because his boss had emailed him earlier that day asking about a work project so thought he was talking with him.
It was getting close to 3:00 pm and Tyler was getting really antsy and wanting to leave to go back to the hotel even though there was still so much to see! He said that we were going to be late for sunset and that he wanted to make sure that we had enough time to watch it (even though sunset was at 4:50 pm). Eventually I gave in and we said goodbye to my friend and headed back to our hotel to change our clothes and head down to the beach. We had dinner reservations after sunset and Tyler insisted that we change into our dinner clothes before we headed to the beach which made no sense to me because we had plenty of time after to go back to the hotel to change. Again I followed along with his plan and changed into a dress and we headed down to the beach. Tyler was holding my hand very tightly and lead me off into a direction that was a bit of a detour to the beach. I was confused and insisted that we go the straight route but he made up some excuse about wanting to see if the grass was real over there. I stopped to bend over and take off my sandals right before we hit the sand and Tyler kept pulling me in a direction that was a detour from the straight shot to the ocean. I was so confused until I looked ahead of us and saw rose petals scattered on the beach and I immediately knew what was happening and started to cry happy tears. Tyler got down on one knee and asked me to be his forever. I was crying so much that I couldn’t even get out the words to say yes! All I wanted to do was kiss him. He had hired photographers to capture the moment and I’m glad he did because it was such a blur! About a month later and I still have to correct myself and say fiancé when talking with others!
