Some people spend years searching for the right person. Others just happen to be in the right place at the right time. For us, it was both.


We are Joe and Mandy—two people whose lives took completely different paths, only to cross at exactly the right moment. Both of us found our way to Williston High School, where fate (and scheduling) forced us into the same room (Mandy’s classroom) for at least an hour a day as team members for last year’s freshman class. Before long, Joe was finding himself wandering into the classroom with his lunch tray, rushing to that room with his challenges, and stopping by that room at the end of each school day. What started as collaboration soon turned into conversation, then into something more—something easy, something undeniable.




We spend our mornings solving the world’s problems over coffee and our evenings finding new ones over a drink. We cook together, clean together, plan our future together, and have our own little Sunday morning traditions. We battle fiercely in spontaneous Nerf wars, binge-watch exactly three episodes of all the best shows, and share a dream of one day packing up an RV and hitting the road—exploring the continent, visiting friends and family, and making sure we don’t miss a single MLB stadium along the way.


But maybe the best part of us is how much we laugh. We laugh at a good fall down the stairs or a pile of dog poops modeled after Stonehenge. We laugh at the heavy, complicated, and downright absurd parts of life, too. We’ve both seen our share of hardship. But instead of letting it bury us, we meet it with humor—the kind that finds its way into the darkest corners, where it’s needed most.




And then there are the little things—the things that somehow matter most. Like how everywhere we go, Joe always finds Mandy the neatest rock, and she always makes sure to be interested. How we can go back and forth like we’ve been married for decades. How we are inseparable, not just because we love each other, but because we truly like each other.


As Mandy’s daughter Emily put it best: If you see them together, it just makes sense