Ben and I met on Hinge (a dating app) in December of 2019. I (Julie) actually cancelled our first date... oops! ;) My sister and her 4 kiddos had just come into town, so I went to see them instead. Reasonable, right? ;) About 2 weeks later though I remembered that I had kind of blown him off, and decided to reach out and see if he still wanted to meet for coffee. I guess you know the rest from there!

Looking back, I think we happened to meet at just the right time- right before Covid! We got to know each other during those months, where we couldn't really do anything social, so we learned to cook (lol). I remember at the end of our second date I jokingly thought, "I could marry this man"... and it turns out I was right! ;) Ben proposed on December 18 of 2020, right before I went back to Buffalo to celebrate Christmas with my family.

Another fun detail in our story is that the coffee shop where we met for the first time (Brew Coffee Bar in Cary), in January of 2020, is actually the same place we first met with our realtor about 10 months later! We bought a house in Wendell, NC in late January of 2021 and got married at the courthouse in Raleigh on February 5th. Crazy how it all came together :) We're so thankful and incredibly blessed for God's perfect timing and all his good gifts!