We first met through our best friend Caitlin Bingham! Kennedy and Caitlin were roommates for three years, and Michael and Caitlin have been close friends since childhood.

Through that time, we bonded through weekly movie nights, Rook, and Sonic trips. Michael's first impression was to be intimidated, and Kennedy's first impression came a few months later when Michael cut his leg in a skiing accident and started showing more personality, and in her words "became interesting".

We each considered ourselves to have become friends on different dates in early 2021. For Michael, he began to think we were friends when Kennedy offered him some curry she cooked sometime in February. Kennedy cites the day we started being friends as March 28th when she asked for his number.

Summer of 2021 led us to spend a lot more time together. Kennedy would come over to Michael's apartment to stress clean his kitchen, and we spent a lot of time long boarding along the Provo River. We talked for hours, and we began to hang out several times per week.

During the rest of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, we continued our best friendship. During the summer of 2022, we progressively deepen our friendship and found more opportunities to spend one-on-one time with each other. Michael would go to Kennedy's apartment most nights, watching Ted Lasso while Michael did a puzzle and Kennedy did a paint-by-number. We talked for hours about everything, nothing, and all the things in between.

At the end of summer, Kennedy moved up to Salt Lake City for work while Michael continued to live in Provo for school. We continued finding ways to hang out throughout this time, taking turns on who would make the drive up or down. We found a new passion for trivia nights and continued to fuel our mutual love of cinema with movie nights.

By this point, both Kennedy and Michael had separately and secretly been musing on the possibility of dating for years. Neither of us wanted to ruin their friendship with each other -- nor were either of us sure that the other person had considered dating-- but confronting the idea started to feel inevitable.

Finally, the conversation was had in the late hours of the night. Michael bravely asked the question, "Have you ever considered us dating?" and -- to his surpise -- Kennedy responded with a assured "yes." And the rest is history! We started dating after that conversation and nervously navigated the shift from platonic best friends to romantic best friends. While both (especially Kennedy), was initially apprehensive about this relationship change, it quickly became apparent of how fun, fulfilling, and easy it felt to be each other's partners. Dating each other felt like an elevated extension of whatwe already had.

After 11 months of dating and 3 years of friendship, Michael proposed to Kennedy on a lighted bridge in Midway, Utah. Right after becoming engaged, we braved the treachourous Provo Canyon crossing admist a major blizzard.