It was September 2017 in New York City, and I had flown from San Diego to stay with my brother (Matthew) and his now wife (Lauren) for the week and hang out with friends in the city. Matthew and Lauren were not only nice enough to have me stay in their one bedroom apartment in the West Village - they allowed my good friend and officiant of our wedding, Pat Propst, to also crash on their fold out couch at the apartment.

By the 5th day of spending all her time with guys (conveniently my birthday, September 9th), Lauren needed another female around and asked Kait Clark to join her hanging out with us. It was that night that I met Kait, and after skipping the line at Sweet & Vicious together I thought to myself ‘this girl is pretty awesome’.

Kait ended up spending the entire weekend hanging with us despite working 70 hours that week (I’ve learned she either operates on no sleep or 12 hours of sleep and there’s no in between), and once I flew back to San Diego we continued to talk pretty regularly.

Fast forward to December of 2017, and Kait was crazy enough to visit me in San Diego for a long weekend. This pretty much confirmed that we wanted to see where this would go, and we proceeded to take cross country trips between NYC and SD (we also mixed in a trip to Austin and Guatemala because why not).

And the rest, folks, is history. About a year to the date later, Kait decided she wanted to move out to San Diego and we found our apartment at 2184 Manchester Ave. that we still live in today! We’ve moved from the upstairs unit to the downstairs one, and now have this dog named Rory that is pretty cool, and we are looking forward to confirming our love for each other by exchanging vows and kissing in front of everyone in Crested Butte on August 22nd (which is the same day that Kait’s parents AND brother got married)!