While the actual planning of this joyous event began only recently, Zane and Ella's wedding has been about twenty-eight years in the making.

Their story begins at Boone Hospital in Columbia, Missouri, one stormy Wednesday afternoon in June of 1996, when a not-so-little baby, Zane, made his first appearance in the world. The building blocks of Zane’s personality were evident from the start. Ever the imaginative child, few things held his attention like movies, his Star Wars figurines, or the fold-out Hogwarts castle playset he shared with his older sister. He spent his childhood with his head in the clouds, his parents often recalling the full-on movie productions he would play out with his action figures— complete with the BOOM! and KABLAM! sound effects he would make with his mouth. During this time, he developed his love of dogs, his passion for the arts, and that happy-go-lucky view of the world that would prove to mesh perfectly with another beautiful soul years and years down the road.

While Zane ran around his backyard with plastic lightsabers, a little girl with thick, untamed curly hair was running barefoot through the tall grass of her own backyard about two-thousand miles away. Born just six months later, in December of 1996, Ella was the opposite of Zane in many ways. Rambunctious, adventurous, and willing to get her hands dirty, Ella spent the first few years of her life exploring the acres around the orchard where she grew up with her childhood dog, Poppy, by her side. She was terribly shy as a child, yet her inquisitive and empathetic nature far outweighed her fears of the unknown. Much to her parents’ chagrin, it wasn’t uncommon for little Ella to traipse into the house holding a frog or a garden snake she’d found, eager to show them the new friend she’d discovered. She climbed the endless walnut tree in her front yard, swam with the neighbor kids in the creek, and picked ollalieberries for summer cobblers. Though that shyness abated as she grew older, she never lost that childlike tenacity and love of the outdoors.

As these two future lovebirds grew up half a country away from each other, they developed a few of the many common threads in their personalities that would later make up the knot they would tie in marriage. Zane’s middle-child energy and inability to speak with an appropriately quiet indoor voice led to a successful tenure in his high school’s theatre department. At the same time, on the West Coast, Ella shed her former shyness and thrived in her own high school’s theatre program as both an actor and a director. Their combined love of the arts would be the common ground on which they laid those initial building blocks for their relationship in the years to come. Each also had endless love for their furrier siblings, Ella with sassy Border Collie, Poppy, and Zane with his best bud, the family Golden Retriever, Bentley. This adoration they shared for Man’s Best Friend was, unbeknownst to them, a glimpse into their future as puppy parents to the only thing they love more than each other: their German Shepherd, Ripley.

After graduating high school in 2014, Zane made the move to the Windy City to attend Columbia College Chicago. This would prove to be the best decision he could have made when choosing a school, as one year later, Ella would follow suit and pick up her life in California to make the jump to Chicago to attend Columbia. At the end of his first year at school, Zane was hired as a Resident Assistant with Columbia College’s on-campus housing facilities. The following fall semester, as the Resident Assistants returned to Columbia a few weeks before classes began for training after a summer away, Zane received a list of the dorm residents he would oversee. On that list, mixed in amongst the dozens of names of incoming students who would be living in the dorms for the 2015/2016 school year, was the name that would accompany his own on a marriage certificate nearly a decade later: Ella Silverman. One of his first “duties” on the job was to reach out to all of the students living in his designated housing group, mainly to introduce himself as their soon-to-be RA and answer any questions they might have had before moving into the dorms. This mostly consisted of awkward conversations with shy freshmen— most of them wanting nothing more than to rush through the introductions and get off the phone as fast as possible. Zane’s phone call with Ella was no exception, though she had extensive questions regarding where she would find her seemingly endless supply of boxes in which she had shipped all her belongings once she got to the dorm. This, in turn, not only made for their first “meeting” but made Zane the very first person Ella spoke with at Columbia College Chicago. The first time they met in person came in the following weeks during the big move-in day on campus. Each RA was given a task, from greeting the incoming residents to passing out room keys to manning the elevators to ensure everyone found their correct apartments. Perhaps the result of his aforementioned loud-speaking voice, Zane was charged with welcoming each student who walked into the dorm’s lobby. He quietly asked each incoming student for their name before shouting to the room, “EVERYBODY WELCOME {NEW STUDENT’S NAME}!” This prompted all of the other RAs in the lobby to burst into wild cheering, mainly met with the blushing cheeks of the freshman and the playful taunts of their parents. When Ella and her parents walked through the door, she received the same treatment. But as Ella and Zane exchanged these quick introductions, neither had any inkling that they had just met their future spouse.

Despite having what they later realized was a mutual crush on one another, the two didn’t interact much the following year outside of the procedural check-ins Zane performed as Ella’s RA and occasionally crossed paths in the dorm's elevator or laundry room. According to Ella, she was thoroughly convinced Zane hated her—as any time she said hello in passing, he was extremely nonchalant, hardly looking up from his phone and offering no more than a passive “hey” in response. If you ask Zane, he was just terribly nervous around the cute girl who lived a floor away and would get the “yips” any time he ran into her. Plus, there were strict rules against RAs dating their residents, so any romantic inclinations would remain an unspoken infatuation so long as he was her RA.

However, this proved to not be entirely true, as the following year, the two still lived in the same dorm, but Ella was no longer one of Zane’s residents. Despite each privately expressing their interest in the other to their mutual friend (and the real reason this wedding is happening at all, in hindsight), Aryn Henderson, and Aryn doing her best to play matchmaker—it would still take Zane another calendar year to finally pluck up the courage to ask Ella out on a date. The big moment finally came, as is the case for many modern romances, when Zane and Ella “matched” on the dating app Tinder. Perhaps it was the extra confirmation that, yes—this was a mutual crush, or maybe it was just less intimidating to flirt from behind a screen, but this was the boost that gave Zane the confidence to ask Ella out on their first date.

Ever the broke college students, the two decided to meet up one evening after Zane got off work and enjoy a stroll along the lake near his apartment in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood in lieu of a fancy “first-date” dinner. The pair found themselves sitting on a bench at the Montrose Beach dog park late into the night, learning about each other’s passions and fears and families and interests and, of course, greeting every cute puppy that ran up to greet them. Those common threads began falling into place, looping and intertwining for the first time. Whether due to the immediate magnetism they shared after that night at the Montrose Park dog beach or the fact that the fabled “honeymoon phase” never really went away even after they started formally dating—their relationship blossomed very quickly. They made things official only a few weeks later and have been practically sewn at the hip in the seven years since. Just five months into their relationship, when Ella found herself looking for a new place to live, Zane bashfully floated, “Hey, maybe we should just move in together.” It was never something that required a serious conversation. Taking that big leap felt as if it were the most natural thing they could have done. Even now, Zane recalls having the conversation with his (rightfully skeptical) parents and saying, “I need you to trust me on this. I think this is the right decision.” The “right decision,” as it turned out, was an understatement. The moment they signed the lease on their first apartment marked the beginning of the whirlwind that would be the next seven years of their lives. They’ve been with each other for every significant milestone— like receiving their Bachelor's degrees (and, in Ella’s case, her Masters), birthdays, holidays, vacations, new jobs, and adopting their first puppy as a familial unit. They weathered the lows the same way they did the highs: together. From hunkering down for Shelter-In-Place during the pandemic, job loss, career uncertainty, and even unexpected family emergencies. All of these life experiences would only help them grow together, and, as Ella so often describes it, their lives together have felt like “one long sleepover with your best friend.” Ella expanded Zane’s tastebuds with her culinary skills, helped him sharpen his bilingual speaking skills with daily pop quizzes on various Spanish curse words, and even got him to go to Europe on his first trip out of the United States. In return, Zane has enlightened Ella in his own cultural traditions, like eating massive cups of Andy’s Frozen Custard, hiking at Mother Nature’s Crack in his hometown, and how to be submissively polite in only the way a Midwesterner can be.

As they neared their sixth anniversary, Ella and Zane planned a brief trip to Florida to escape the Chicago winter weather. While there, Zane insisted they visit a quaint botanical garden near St. Augustine because “the trees look cool on their website!” While it was true that the trees did “look cool” on the website for the botanical garden, there was an ulterior motive for the excursion. In this garden, beneath an expansive Spanish Moss tree, Zane got down on one knee and asked for Ella’s hand in marriage. In that moment, all of those common threads, all of the highs and lows they’ve experienced as a couple, all of the laughs and inside jokes and little moments they’ve shared solidified with one word, spoken by Ella through cheerful tears: “Yes!”

Now, as the couple’s wedding date draws nearer, they are endlessly grateful for the love and support they’ve received from you, dear reader! You receiving an invitation to celebrate their union means that you have contributed your own light and love in Zane and Ella’s lives and they can’t wait to see you in Littleton for their festivities!

Hosting their celebration in Colorado was an easy choice for the couple as it’s the site of their first vacation together and the host of endless fond memories in the mountains. With countless natural spectacles, inventive eats, and fascinating history (with special attention to the couple’s most favorite historical topics: true crime and the paranormal), they can’t wait to share this place of treasured memories with you.

See you soon in the Mile-High City!