How We Met
We met our freshman year in college through the church group we were part of. Throughout all 4 years, we had very little interaction with each other (very, very little). It wasn’t until the very end of our senior year, when Stephanie’s bff Kathleen (& now maid of honor) decided to “ship” us (aka put us in a relation”ship”). Kathleen kept telling Stephanie that she & Nick would make the perfect pair! When we graduated, our friend groups merged and we began hanging out in a group setting more often [group hang outs, bbqs, parties & mini weekend trips]. Months go by and our 1-on-1 interactions were still few and far between. But Kathleen was very persistent, and in the end all of her efforts paid off!
How They Asked
knew I wanted to keep it simple but sentimental, so I figured why not recreate our first date? It was fun, casual, and filled with some of our favorite foods and desserts. Fortunately for me, we were coming up on the anniversary of our first date, so we were already thinking of revisiting all our first date spots. That helped me keep an element of surprise to it. It was the perfect summer SoCal day, and we started off with lunch at Bear Flag Fish Co, one of our favorite places to eat poke. After lunch, we made our way over to the Balboa Fun Zone Arcade, where we spent the some time playing arcade games such as air hockey, basketball hoop shootout, and skee ball to win tickets for small silly prizes. We ended up with temporary tattoos & Pixie Stix – some pretty great prizes. From there, we crossed over to Balboa Island to pick up frozen bananas for dessert (Steph’s favorite). Finally, although it wasn’t part of our first date, I suggested walking to and relaxing at a nearby field that overlooked the water. That was were I planned to ask the big question.
After our first date, I had jokingly created a short date survey for Steph to fill out. I asked questions such as, “How was my driving?” “How well dressed was I?” “How excited were you?” “How much fun did you have?” She had to answer all of the questions based on a scale of 0 to 1. The final, bonus question was: Who is better at air hockey? The options being “Nick,” “Steph,” and “I prefer not to answer.” Steph chose “I prefer not to answer” for that question.
For the proposal, I prepared the same survey instead with the bonus question being: Will you marry me? Somehow I accidentally forgot to include “no” as an option for the answer.. When we got to the field, I casually handed her the survey to fill out. She began filling it out and pretended to cover her answers from me, which allowed me to get the ring ready without being too conspicuous. When she finally got to the bonus question, she paused, then turned to look at me. I gave a quick speech, dropped to my knee, and repeated the bonus question: Will you marry me?
