When Maddie walked into work on May 4th of 2017, I didn’t know it right away, but it didn’t take long for me to figure out that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

In what I consider a short time in the long scheme of life, we started to hang out after work. Started simple enough as a good time with a couple of back of house friends at Waffle House one night after work. It was adorable, though I didn’t realize until later that she thought we were cool. She went home and came back with a leather jacket.

After a while we started a gaming group and she volunteered to share her books with some of us that may not have had them so that way we could get a group together and I volunteered to be the leader (the one telling the story). We figured out we both enjoyed storytelling. She has always had a great way with words. I could tell based on the numerous stories she had a concept for. I only ever had one that I had worked on, but I have a great imagination, therefore I thought I could handle it. It started as just a few of us. Then as we began to play, our group kept growing. We ended up with around 11 of us, not including myself.

Anyways, why that's important is because it was the start of something special for us as Maddie and I began hanging out after work a lot more. Sometimes sitting in the car watching videos, other times looking at the different books, including new ones she would get. Sometimes, we would go on drives out to the next town over and back listening to music and just talking about our day or life in general. Other times, we would go to places with the back of house crew that we had grown close with, including Nathan, DJ, and Ewan, all of which are in our bridal party and such good friends to the both of us.

On days where Maddie and I weren’t hanging out, being nervous, I had to turn to someone I could talk to about my feelings. That would be DJ and Megan. We spent countless nights after work talking, mostly about how the day went and what was going on in our lives outside of work, including how to go about asking Maddie if she would consider dating me. Of course, it was shortly after that I finally gathered the courage.

So, as our date, she had told me of this place called Cave Springs where they did a cave tour. Unfortunately, it was closed, but we still got to look at the pond and see the ducks. We then went back and had a small snack, followed by dinner and a movie.

Along the way, we have done many activities. Gone to a number of 4th of Julys and New Years parties with our friends, gone to quite a few escape rooms. We did two bowling leagues with my dad and one of her brothers. More recently, we went to Halloween Horror Nights and Disney last year. The list goes on and on, but all along the way, our bond grew stronger. It was cemented a few months before COVID that I was going to marry her. She was not aware that I had already gained her parents' blessing (which I had to do again later in 2023, and this time I actually got to ask her).

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