Cassandra and David

HOW WE MET

David and I first met during our Sophomore year of college at UC Irvine at a church fellowship, The Edge. In my memory, our first encounter was when he came up to me after our fellowship event had ended and started a conversation. He asked if I remembered him. First of all, that sounded just like any other line a guy would use to pick up a girl. Second of all, I genuinely didn’t remember meeting him. So, I said “No, sorry I don’t remember you.” (Oops, ouch) He later tried cueing my memory that we met at a KBBQ event a couple months prior. 5 years later, I still can’t remember meeting him at the event and he’s still holding that against me until this day. Despite the fact that I didn’t remember meeting David at our very first encounter, he still continued approaching me. As time goes on, our brief conversations turned into late night talks, our group hangouts with our mutual friends turned into one on ones. When I had jokingly asked him to visit me in San Francisco during the summer, he took it seriously and took all sorts of transportations from San Jose just to spend time with me. His actions never cease to surprise me even until this day.

HOW THEY ASKED

The proposal was a semi-surprise. Let me explain – we had already talked about future plans (including marriage) in 2019. We knew we wanted to get married in the next couple years in order to line up with some of our other life goals. We had planned this getaway trip to Joshua Tree in a secluded yurt. I thought it would be cool to “surprise” her during this trip since we preferred a more intimate experience (discussed beforehand). She recently took interest in long-term exposure photos of stars so I thought it would be cool to do it under the stars.During one of the nights at Joshua Tree, we drove around looking for an even more secluded area with no lights to take photos. We eventually found a nice spot and took some amazing photos of the Milky Way. As she was busy cleaning up the equipment, I seized the moment and got on my knees, sweating profusely mind you, and waited for her to turn around. When she did, I then proceeded to give my awesome speech (which I don’t recall at this point) and asked for her hand. One of my favorite memories from that trip was when I had to get down on my knees another twenty times so she could get a perfect engagement photo using a tripod.