On January 13th, 2018 we met at a party that our mutual friends, Molly and Alex, were throwing at Alex’s apartment. Molly was one of Katie’s best friends from high school, and Alex was one of my best friends since kindergarten. After the party, Alex and Molly told me that I should reach out to Katie—unbeknownst to them, I already had.

I was in grad school in Colorado at the time. So the first year and a half of our relationship was long distance. After talking on the phone and texting for the first month of knowing each other, I decided to take my first plane ride back to St. Louis to visit Katie for our first date. I unknowingly planned our date on Valentine's day weekend. We went out to eat at Pi Pizzeria and ended up talking all night until the restaurant closed at midnight.

After that weekend, it was back to texting and long talks over the phone. Whenever I had breaks from school, I would come home to Missouri and go see Katie every chance I could. In October of 2018, Katie flew out to Colorado to visit me. I took her hiking all around Boulder (which Katie wasn’t prepared for), and I took her up to St. Mary’s Glacier, where we were able to sit and look out over the mountain range and all of the green evergreen trees.

I graduated in 2019 and moved back to Missouri. We saw each other almost every weekend that we could. Then after almost five years of dating, I secretly bought a ring and planned a ‘reunion’ trip back to Boulder in April 2023. I took Katie back up to St. Mary’s Glacier and proposed to her where we had one of our first dates in Colorado. But instead of green evergreens to see like last time, the entire mountain was covered in more than a foot of snow and a ‘small’ snow storm was blowing through. Thankfully, Katie was prepared for hiking this time and she said “yes”! She said yes so fast when I pulled the ring out, that I almost wasn’t able to get out all the words I had planned in my head. (This was either because Katie loved me so much, she was undoubtedly ready to spend the rest of her life with me, or because she was freezing and ready to get off that blizzarding mountain.)