How We Met
In September 2009, I had gone to a club fair on campus on my very first day of college as a freshman at Santa Clara University and decided to attend a meeting. Then, on the second day, I attended said meeting and met Reggie, who was a sophomore at the time. He was nice and friendly, as usual, and we chatted for a bit before he introduced himself to other new members. As the years went on, we became fairly close mostly because we had the same group of friends. This went on for two years.
My junior year begins and Reggie and I (along with four other friends) are all living in the same house off-campus. While living in the same space and spending more time together than ever, we learned things about each other that we didn’t know before on a deeper scale. I was able to open up to him about hardships I was going through which I had never really done before since I tend to be a naturally light-hearted and outgoing person. To this day, I believe that he was sent to me to help me through them. Feelings gradually developed midway through that years and the rest is history!
How They Asked
We planned a vacation to London in October 2018 and decided to take the quickest little detour to Paris (because why not?!). We wake up at 3:30 AM to get ready and take the earliest Eurostar train and make our way to the station. Looking back, I realize, there were definitely signs he was acting a little strange – waking up earlier than me, keeping his arm in a certain position to cover up a pocket in his jacket.
We reach Paris and instead of going to the Hop on Hop off bus tour as we had planned, he decides he wants to go to the Tuileries Garden because his “coworker” said it’s very pretty. We luckily figure our way through the Metro and find ourselves at the garden which I immediately find to be as beautiful as he described and started taking pictures like the tourists we are. We reach a certain part of the gardens and we are in the middle of a long row of trees. Except for two people I believe to be tourists a couple of feet away, we are the only ones in this area.
All of a sudden, Reggie faces me and begins his spiel about how we’ve been together all this time and our relationship (honestly, I can’t remember any of it to save my life! haha). I was shocked and embarrassed only because we are one of the only people in this part of the garden and he decides to start proposing next to these other two tourists! I look at them and realize they aren’t touristy at all but our photographer and videographer Reggie had previously hired (shoutout to Daria and Irina <3)! Anyway, he soon gets down on one knee and neither of us remembers if I actually said yes but really, there was no question at all. It’s a little crazy to think of how little decisions we make in our lives determine such huge events that happen in our futures, but I guess that’s how that works, right?
