For me, things first started before even moving to Seattle. It was a couple months prior when our church was doing a trip to Seattle to get an idea of what church planting would be like. The day before the trip I spent the night with Kyle and Emma. I have the distinct memory of Kyle cutting my hair in the living room while Kailey and Emma talked and thinking to myself “Kailey is really cute, I wonder if we’ll ever date?”

Fast forward a couple of years and the answer is yes, after 2 years of becoming good friends, I started to have feelings for Kailey pretty much the same time she did. My very introverted self suddenly got a lot more social and we started spending significantly more time around each other that spring. I’d always thought highly of Kailey, she was a good friend who I knew loves the Lord and community so well. And the more I saw of her health struggles and her strength in them, my initial crush quickly became “I want to spend the rest of my life with her”.

In early June I was having dinner at Kyle and Emma’s apartment when I told them I had feelings for Kailey. This was only a few days after Kailey and Emma had a full conversation about me so the two of them already knew Kailey had feelings as well. Which made things so much easier (community is great). So Kyle and Emma controlled their excitement as much as possible and strongly encouraged me to hurry up and ask her out without explicitly telling me ahead of time that Kailey also had feelings.

So about a week later I texted Kailey ahead of DnD asking if we could talk beforehand. It was easily the most nervous I’ve ever been, I had to sit on my hands because they were shaking so bad. Which if you don’t know me, I used to be such a stoic and unreadable person before I went and fell in love.

For our first date we went and got ice cream in Ballard, sat on the beach at Golden Gardens until past sunset, and then ended the night in true Seattle fashion with some Dick’s burgers. The nerves didn’t go away until almost 2 hours into the date.

I knew from the first date, and every date, every moment, every conversation afterwards made me more and more certain that I wanted nothing more than to marry this woman.