Our story begins in high school. We started dating on August 6, 2014, but Brontë and I met months before that in high school band class. She sat in the front of the class and I sat in the back with the other troublemakers. At the end of my Junior year and her Sophomore year we both started to get involved in band extracurriculars separately.

As a result of this we started to spend more time together outside of class at events such as drum major camp and musicals. Brontë will tell you that it was she who noticed me first and started to talk to me in a more-than-friend way but it was actually the opposite. I just didn’t think a girl like her would ever go for a guy like me so I never made a move. It came as a surprise, then, when she invited me over to her parent’s house to watch a show I thought she was interested in. This turned out to be a ruse to lure me over there under false pretenses. But it was too late, I was head-over-heels and we went on multiple dates in the summer of 2014.

After my senior year I went to college and she was stuck in high school for her senior year. This began the period of our relationship that we refer to as “long-distance” even though the distance wasn’t very long, at first. After I graduated from college I got a job in Wisconsin which made a long-distance relationship even longer distance. An hour and a half drive suddenly became five and a half hours.

A year later I moved to the middle of nowhere Iowa and Brontë moved back home to Michigan. This turned a five-and-a-half-hour drive into ten whole hours, our farthest distance apart. Despite that, we hung onto our relationship and each other knowing that we were closing in on when we could be in the same place together.

The time finally came when I moved back to Wisconsin in 2021. I asked her to make a very big move and move with me to Wisconsin, away from her family and friends. That was the first time she made my life better with one word: “yes”. She quickly found a job in Madison and I worked on the other side of the state so we found a place in between to live. We lived there for about a year and a half before finding a house in town.

A day or two before our eighth anniversary I finally asked Brontë to marry me. Her family was in town visiting and she was heavily hinting that it would be a good time to propose. In response, I lied through my teeth that it wasn’t going to happen that weekend to throw her off the scent. This worked a little too well as she was a tad upset. We all went to a putt-putt golf course on that hot summer night and her father and I conspired to place the ring into the second-to-last hole (as the final hole goes to the ball return). As she sank her putt I went to get her ball for her, grabbing the ring from the hole and getting down on one knee. This was the second time she made my life better with one word.

A couple of months later I got a job in Madison at the end of 2022 and we bought a house in Madison proper. We moved into town in June of 2023 and have been loving the new place. We are getting married over Memorial Day weekend of 2024, a little over three months before our tenth-year anniversary. An entire decade of being together and only three of those years actually in the same place. Though somehow, it feels like we’ve always been together. And we always will be.

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