How We Met
We met 10 years ago, in LA, when he was in visiting for a bachelor party and I lived there. My friend went to college with him so I stopped by a hookah bar to meet her college friends in town from Maryland. I didn’t really remember meeting him, to be honest. I do still have a post on my Facebook wall from January 2011 from him saying “it was nice meeting you tonight” from that first night in LA. Fast forward to 6 months later. I moved to New York City and a mutual friend asked me to go with her to a housewarming party. It was HIS housewarming party, as he had also just moved to New York City from Maryland. I told him he should check out the outdoor summer movie scene. I remember thinking he was really cute. The next day, I posted the outdoor movie calendar and asked him out on his Facebook wall (yes, this was back when posting publicly on peoples’ walls was a thing). A few days later, we saw an outdoor movie by the water and that was our first date, in August 2011. I remember we talked through the whole movie and when we decided to leave, the movie was over.
How They Asked
The morning of the proposal, he told me to “dress cute” after work. This wasn’t really that abnormal of him but still weird. Like, what I don’t always dress cute? After work, we went bike riding up the Hudson River on our shared Citi bikes. But he stopped before an area to dock the bikes and asked me to carry my bike towards the river. That’s when I KNEW something was up. There was a dock a block away, so it didn’t make sense. Once we got to the river, he asked me if I knew where we were. “Chelsea?” I said. He said it was the place where we had our first date, the outdoor movie we had watched in 2011. The whole place had been renovated and landscaped so I didn’t even recognize it! Then he asked me to sit on a bench by the water and had this terrified, worried look on his face. He was so nervous and stuttered all of his words. It was the cutest thing. He finally asked and I screamed a bit so strangers took pictures which they sent to us later. It was on the water right before sunset, and beautiful. He brought a bottle of champagne that we popped open and wandered through the park in smiles. I wanted to cherish the moment so we waited a few hours before we started telling people. There was something cool about it finally happening and us being the only ones who knew.
