I visited Andrew, my brother, January 2020. Matt who attended Andrew's board game nights met me along with my parents all at once that night. Immediately, he thought I was cute (even though this is Amy writing this, it was confirmed with Matt that this is true) and he was impressed that I was silently beating everyone at terraforming mars (this is a board game for those of you who may not know). Unfortunately, seeing as I was heading back to Chicago in a couple of days, Matt did not do anything. Later that year, I decided to pursue graduate school at Duke. At this point in time, Andrew had several more conversations with matt, which made Andrew realize that Matt and I would get along well. Therefore, Andrew immediately started trying to set us up, not knowing that Matt was already interested.

A couple weeks after I moved to North Carolina, Matt asked me out. We had a great time grabbing coffee and going for a walk on our first date (August 30th 2020). Although I wasn't sure how long term this would be, I knew I wanted to see him again. So we went on another date and soon it became clear that we both never wanted this to end.

Originally, Matt had planned to propose on top of the same mountain that we had gone backpacking on during our first year of dating. Unfortunately, last minute there was predicted to be severe thunderstorms in the mountains that weekend. Since he had already planned with me that we were going on a trip for my "birthday," he quickly pivoted plans. He booked a mountain cabin and proposed on the porch. It was a lovely intimate moment just the two of us like we had always wanted.

On October 5th, we will get married. This is a day we have been looking forward to for a long time. Even though we have known we were life partners for a while, we want to share this joy we have found in each other with all our friends and family. This is where you all come in! Please join us to celebrate the wonderful love we have for each other and the joining of our lives and our families lives together.