How We Met
One year. That was the longest that Daniel could wait to ask me to marry him. Daniel is like no other man that I have ever met. He is unselfish, confident, sweet, chivalrous, charismatic, and most of all, loving. He is the type of guy that won’t let me leave bed if I cough once, remember my coffee order after only telling him once in passing, and send me flowers ‘just because’. Yet he also is not afraid to defend me when the hardware store manager looks at him instead of me, while answering MY question. Daniel is someone that believes in a ‘big love’. In fact, we both believe in a ‘big love’ and it is something that he reminds me of everyday. He will greet me after work with the same enthusiasm and love that he has shown me since the first day we ‘met’.
Daniel and I ‘met’ when we first matched on a dating app. That day he was helping his younger sister move into her apartment and expectantly injured himself in the process. While they were at the emergency room, his mother had asked if she could ‘play’ on his dating app. After he reluctantly agreed to let her ‘play’, she quickly learned the rules of the dating app. Meanwhile, in a few towns over, I had been visiting my younger brother. That day, I too opened the app and ‘swiped right’ on Daniel’s profile around the same time that his mother had ‘swiped right’ on me! Little did we both know that as soon as we started talking, we would never have to go a day without communicating again. That first phone call to him was the most nerve-racking moment. I closed my eyes and tapped his name on my phone as quickly as possible, in hopes that it might somehow make me less anxious. From that day on we talked on the phone for three weeks straight. When we finally set a date to meet it was more than a month after we had first spoken with each other, but that’s what I love most about our story because we really had to get to know each other in that first 4 weeks. Workdays always seemed to linger, as I couldn’t wait to get home to talk more with Daniel.
how they asked
We were planning on watching the sunset on the beach- something that we have often done- and then going to dinner to celebrate our one-year anniversary. On the drive over, I could tell something was up with Daniel but I figured that he was worried that we wouldn’t make it for the sunset. We walked hand in hand along the beach that his grandparents used to take him to and we approached a lifeguard chair that was decorated in the most romantic way.
There were rose petals and candles leading up to the chair with a gorgeous backdrop of a fiery red and orange sunset (I should have known right then and there that this was all of his perfect planning being put into action). I pulled Daniel a little bit closer and motioned to the chair as I told him how ‘cute’ it was decorated for someone else. He wanted to walk over to it but I had to tell him twice that we shouldn’t interrupt someone else’s plans. After him asking a third time, I gave in to take a look at the lifeguard chair. When we got closer he finally told me that this was his gift for our anniversary. I didn’t think anything more of it because he is the romantic, sweep-you-off-your-feet type of man.
We climbed up into the chair and he had everything planned out with a blanket, a bouquet of roses, some type of book, and champagne. He explained again that his ‘gift’ was the photo album that was there. Little did I know, for weeks prior to this, Daniel had been asking my mom for photos of me of when I was growing up. He used them to make “Our book of firsts” photo album. He had photo-shopped old photographs of ourselves to make it look like we had actually been in the photos together. There was our ‘first birthday party’, ‘first time getting caught holding hands’, ‘first communion’ and so on. It then moved onto photos of us that we really had been in together, ‘first house’, ‘first puppy’, etc. The last page is when he said that there was one more first that we needed to experience together that night, ‘the first day of the rest of our lives together’. Needless to say, this is where I started bawling my eyes out as he bent down on one knee and reached behind him for a small box with the most beautiful ring that he designed for me. As we embraced he told me that there was a sneaky photographer on the beach that captured the entire proposal. We laughed about it all and the photographer took the last picture of us for our photo album, for the page titled ‘the first day of the rest of our lives together’.
My last surprise was that he had gathered both of our families at our house to celebrate the engagement with us! He had even flown in my older brother that I hadn’t seen in a few months! If this doesn’t show how thoughtful of a man that Daniel is, then I can give you a number of other stories about him. I am so thankful to have met Daniel and I am so lucky to be able to spend the rest of my life with him.
