How We Met
Patrick and I met at the end of junior year in high school through someone else I was dating, and back then, he was a very intimidating individual, so I was very apprehensive. It was between classes, so it was very brief, but through more interaction, he and I became friends. He wasn’t so intimidating after all, but much more of a softie.
After we graduated a year later, he went off to an introductory college course at WVU and kind of lost touch with each other for a few months. When he came back, I admitted to him that I sorta, kinda, maayyybe had a crush on him, and he told me the same thing. The rest is history. We did long distance from late 2010 until late 2012. I moved to West Virginia with him early 2013 and we lived there until mid-2016, when we couldn’t afford to live there anymore and moved back home to PA. By then we had been dating for almost seven years, and everyone was wondering when he was finally going to ask me to marry him.
how they asked
I always mentioned to him that I wanted a very private proposal, no photographers, no other people, just us. So on a Friday night, he took me back to his place, where his mom had gotten a fire going in the fire pit in his backyard. I noticed there were Christmas lights wrapped around the tree trunks and linked together between the trees. His mom said it was for more backyard decoration. She made us hot cocoa with Baileys, and right as she took our cups in, she plugged in the lights. It looked beautiful, and I played it off as just decoration until I looked across the yard and saw a huge heart made out of more Christmas lights.
That is when I started bawling because I knew. He read me a very heartfelt, very sweet letter that he had typed up himself, and at the end of it, he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. Of course, I said YES! The feeling was and still is, very overwhelming, and very euphoric. I cannot wait to spend my life with him.
