how we met
John and I were both students at The University at Buffalo, and had been to the same parties weekend after weekend for three years, but for some reason our paths didn’t cross until the summer of 2010. John, being the persistent person he is, spotted me out one night and enlisted his friend Seth to make sure I was single, and at their next party.
A few nights later, we ended up at the same house and Seth (very smoothly) made sure to introduce the two of us to one another. We chatted for a bit until John asked me to play beer pong with him, and within the first 5 minutes, he made me laugh so hard I had tears running down my face (laughter is truly the way to a girls heart). That night, I think we both realized that we had stumbled across something very special that neither of us ever wanted to be without again.
how they asked
Over the next 6 years, we tackled obstacles together that most people in their twenties encounter (graduating, trying to find jobs, moving, finding new jobs, introducing our families, trying to figure out how “the real world” works, etc.) and finally, in August 2015, we moved into our first apartment together on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with our dog, Stella.
On May 4th, 2016 (John’s 27th birthday), we had plans to go to our favorite spot on the water in Central Park that overlooks the NYC Skyline. The plan was to relax and have a drink there before heading over to Dinosaur BBQ in Harlem for his birthday dinner, or so I thought. It was raining all day but stopped right as we stepped foot out the door and because it had just cleared up, we basically had the park to ourselves which was incredible.
John had his GoPro camera on his backpack and said he was making a time-lapse video of his birthday (he’s a bit of a tech nerd so I thought nothing of it). A few moments after we got to the spot, he turned to me, got down on one knee and proposed. It was the most incredible moment I could have asked for.
Little did I know that not only had John been taking a video of the entire day, he had also asked our friends to take pictures of the proposal from across the pond, and our friends were nice enough to hire a professional photographer to capture the moment up close. Once the tears subsided and John started cheering, he took out a bottle of champagne, a blanket for us to sit on, and a speaker to play some music. To top it all off, John told me he found my Manager’s email on LinkedIn several days beforehand and that we were both taking the next day off of work.
Once it started to get darker in the park, he told me he wanted to grab drinks at a bar by our apartment, but when we got there the bar was filled with some of our closest friends and family, waiting to celebrate with us. There was a crazy amount of thought, planning and logistics that went into the proposal, and it was truly better than I could have ever imagined. I mean, who is actually selfless enough to propose on their own birthday?