I met Jamie during our sophomore year at Duquesne University. We both took a night class on Tuesdays called the Psychology of Nature. That class lasted nearly 3 hours each time, and I took every chance I could get to talk to her during the break in the middle of class, plus before and after if I could... eventually finding a way to get her phone number (although she might argue that she got mine). From there, we spent the spring semester going on countless study and Starbucks dates across campus, meeting each other’s friends, and finding nature spots to sit in and explore around Pittsburgh (it would’ve been a tough start to a relationship if one of us would’ve failed the class we met in, after all).


We spent a lot of the next few years in the South Side of Pittsburgh, where we had both ended up moving while we finished school. Every one of my favorite places in Pittsburgh has a memory with Jamie tied to it: we saw a lot, we laughed a lot, and we fell in love with each other and our city.


When Jamie started dental school at Boston University in 2021, and when I moved there to be with her in 2023 after finally finishing at Duquesne, we had a new city to fall in love with. Boston is where we were constantly running along the Charles River, we lost track of all the restaurants we became obsessed with, and we developed muscle memory for the hustle needed to catch the bus home from church to make it in time for the Steelers kickoff. It was also the city where we got engaged! On August 26th, 2024, I made a dinner reservation in East Boston under the pretense of celebrating a new job. Against all odds, Jamie thought that all of my nervousness and awkwardness that night must have been related to that and not all part of a proposal plan, and she was really surprised. Later that week, we flew back to Pennsylvania, where both of our parents were there to throw Jamie another surprise party (not calling her gullible, but that was two surprises in one week). In June 2025, we moved back to Pittsburgh, the city where we’ll get married!