How we met: Honestly, I added Matt as a friend on Facebook back in 2009. I thought he was cute, we had mutual friends, so I thought, “what the hell?” and went for it. When I added him, Matt was working as a sound designer for a cruise line and I was heading off to school. He actually did it for four and a half for more years, so our interactions were strictly online, extremely innocent. After school, I moved back to Indianapolis, and finally asked Matt on a date. His response: “If you’re boring, you’re paying.” Needless to say, he ended up paying :).
how they asked: Zach, our roommate, convinced me to throw Matt a surprise birthday party. Zach is an amazing videographer, so he offered to make a ‘roast’ video, with outlandish stories and jokes from our friends. I invited Matt’s family (they live about 3 hours away) down for the party, and Zach set up a secret Facebook event.
Fast forward to the night of the “birthday party”: I pick up Matt from work, and have to kill 3 hours, so I made him browse the aisles of Target with me, we grabbed dinner, and walked around one of our favorite neighborhoods (side note: I am a nervous sweater and a horrible secret-keeper, so I am sweating BULLETS right now!). We pull into our garage and open the door to the backyard to our friends singing “Happy Birthday,” while holding signs that spell out “H-A-P-P-Y B-I-R-T-H-D-A-Y M-A-T-T.”
We sit down to watch the roast video, our friends and his family behind us. At the end of the video, the camera zooms out from a story to Zach and Matt sitting on the couch. I was so irked that Matt was in on the entire thing (you can obviously tell in the video!), but things ended up a helluva lot better than I ever could have imagined. Matt (in the “roast video”) tells me to turn around, and all of the signs read, “T-J W-I-L-L Y-O-U M-A-R-R-Y M-E ?” I was completely speechless (and think I blacked out! — thank God for the video!).
The birthday party turned out to be our engagement party, and the night was perfect. The wedding is October 3rd, 2015, and we could not be more excited!
PS – I’ve also included the ridiculously amazing dessert and candy bar my soon-to-be mother-in-law put together. It is INSANE! Matt asked her to bring cupcakes.
