Maurits and Jessica met while they were both doing mission work. Jessica was doing a School of Frontier Missions in Dubai. And Maurits was doing a Explorer DTS in Herrnhut, Germany. He was in his outreach portion of the DTS, they spent some time in Jordan and then came to Dubai. They lived across the hall from one another and Jessica started spending a lot of time with his outreach team. Jessica wanted to start a prostitute ministry and his team wanted to be apart as well. They started building kits for the women, going like 2 times a week. This gave Jessica time to see Maurits in a ministry capacity and she developed a crush on him. He was the only male student on his team, there were three female students, who she started to grow closer to as well. She started trying to spend more time with him, watching Loki the marvel show together, going to the gym together, and was not hiding her intention. But she was unclear how he felt so Jessica went to his leaders to ask permission to speak to him before they left to go back to Germany. There was some miscommunication which ended up with them telling Jessica he didnt have feelings for her. Fortunately for Jessica the entire team except him and one other got COVID along with her and one of her teammates. So Jessica moved in with his team and Maurits moved in with hers. Over the next two weeks Jessica wrestled with her feelings and ended up asking Maurits’ male leader again about what exactly he said, turns out he didnt think he knew that she liked him. So him and Jessicas leader talked her into texting Maurits to talk. Jessica got out of quarantine the next day and they talked and decided they both had feelings for each other and started dating. Unfortunately Maurits team left 2 days after this, so they started the relationship long distant, they have gotten quite used to that because they were long distant for almost two years before deciding they needed to be closer in proximity to decide if they wanted to get married. Over this last year Jessica stayed in the Netherlands or on that side of the world so they could see each other more. This summer they decided that they do want to get married, and on December 2, after returning from missions in Lebanon Maurits proposed at a beautiful castle. They will now get married in America, but will live in the Netherlands for at least the next year while Jessica finishes school. So excited for the next chapter of their lives.