How We Met
Billy and I met on Tinder in 2013 when I was 21 and he was 22 (I always joke that we were the only two on the app at the time!) We quickly bonded over our love of hockey – go Flyers! – and our taste in music. Because of young stupidity, I wanted to just be friends and not actually take anything to a real meaningful level. We chatted so often about all the things we had in common, and a couple of months in I decided enough was enough and found out where his ice hockey game was at and at what time and showed up as a surprise. In hindsight, this was extremely creepy and he probably should have blocked me, but to this day he swears it was endearing! After many more months of young stupidity on my end, we finally went on a first real date in April of 2014. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was a Flyers game. We began dating shortly after.
How They Asked
Billy and I travel with a big group of friends often, and we had plans to travel to Lake Placid, New York for New Years Eve. The cabin had 5 groups of couples, and we have gotten so close they are like family to us. We were the last to arrive after work on Friday, and everyone was already winding down after a fun night so Billy and I hung out with our friends for a bit and then went to sleep. Before bed, Billy mentioned that for his mother’s birthday he thinks it would be so nice to gift her a nice photograph of us standing on the frozen Mirror Lake tomorrow morning, and then also get nice photos of his siblings and their partners when we return home. Since Billy is a professional wedding photographer, I fully trust his photography ideas and agreed whole heartedly.
The next morning we woke up early, as we typically do, and bundled up to go walk on the lake. It was completely frozen through, and since it was early there were not many people around. We walked down and Billy set up his camera so the mountains were visible in the background. After setting up his tripod, he set his camera to take 200 pictures in a row. When I saw the lens continuing to snap, I turned to ask why it was doing that, and he was down on one knee. I will be the first to admit that Billy and I definitely are not ashamed to cry in front of each other, and soon we were both on the ice crying. Eventually, I composed myself enough to say yes!
Once we walked back to the camera, Billy broke out laughing out loud. The professional photographer forgot to turn off the autofocus feature on his camera, so all our pictures focused on the beautiful mountains in the background and left us blurry! He claims he wasn’t nervous, but he is very good at his job and I think nerves played a big part in his mess up! We attempted to fake a couple “on one knee” pictures, but of course, they don’t look exactly right. We eventually got some nice in-focus photos of us together.
Before we left the ice he then asked me if I had seen the ring box. Engraved on the side of the ring box is a lyric from our favorite artist, Gregory Alan Isakov. We adore him so much, we once saw him in 2 countries in one week (Philadelphia, and then 5 days later in Brussels, Belgium). The lyric is from a song that Billy has always said reminds him of me. The photos of me realizing this are authentic and caused us to cry some more.
We left the ice with a couple “congratulations” from some spying dog walkers and went to a coffee shop to regroup. After coffee, we went back to the cabin and all our friends had the house decorated with streamers and balloons. We had lots of champagne, celebrated a lot, and then the whole group went ice skating!
We don’t have much planned for the wedding yet, but all I know is there will be a lot of crying, Gregory Alan Isakov will be the main soundtrack, and I’m sure all our photos will be in focus.