How We Met: I opened my eharmony account one year ago last Sunday. It was Mother’s Day. I only opened the account at the persistent request of my dad, so I was a little reluctant going into it. However, that night I came across Shannon’s account. I didn’t know you could send a direct email, so the first kinds of communication I saw that I could have with her were by sending her a smile or by sending the five prewritten questions, so I did both. I waited for 3 days for a response and was getting pretty discouraged about not getting one back, when while I was at work the following Wednesday I got an email saying that she had responded to my questions and sent me some herself.
I immediately had butterflies and opened the email. We began communicating back and forth until Friday evening, at which point, I asked if we could meet somewhere for coffee. She asked if we could have a Skype date first, so the next day we had a video chat for 3 hours! At the end of that chat, I asked again if we could meet up.
She agreed and the following Monday (one week after I opened my account) we went on our first date, which was mini golf and go-carts and sushi to end the night. We lived an hour apart from each other, but we hit it off so well, not a week went by without us seeing each other after that. What I quickly learned was that Shannon had had her eharmony account for one year and when she got my original email, she only had one week left and was planning on just letting her subscription expire. You can call it a coincidence, but we choose to believe that God had something to do with it.
From there, the rest is pretty much history and last Saturday I proposed to the love of my life on a sailboat in Long Beach, California and we now have our wedding date set for January 30, 2016 at Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena.
how they asked: Shannon and her dad went sailing for the day. When they got back, they docked the little sailboat on the back of this big yacht that belongs to some family friends. I (Conner) was hiding on top of the yacht. Shannon went inside the yacht to change and fix herself up because she thought she was getting ready to leave to meet me at another location in Long Beach for a double date with some friends. While she was inside changing, I came out, got the photographers in place, got the sail boat ready with rose petals, candles, a blanket and a laptop and then I went to hide on the side of the big yacht. When Shannon walked out, her friend was waiting to show Shannon to her seat on the sailboat. Shannon then watched a video with my family and hers talking about how happy they were we were together.
Then the video switched to a home video of Shannon and her dad getting in married in the living room of their house when Shannon was 4 years old. Afterward, our song (“Beautiful” by Jim Brickman & Wayne Brady) started playing and the screen went black and said “Shannon, I want to make sure the rest of your life is done properly. -Conner” and then I walked out onto the sailboat, got down on one knee and proposed.
Photography by Juan Aguirre of Voyageur Photography