Vanessa and I met in downtown Chicago in May 2021. At the time, we both lived in Lincoln Park and met for a walk and outdoor dinner on Wells Street. Vanessa now lives on the Gold Coast’s Dearborn Street, just a mile walk through the Lincoln Park Zoo and along the Lake Michigan coastline away from me.

Vanessa and I both grew up in small towns - Lambertville, Michigan & Marshfield, Wisconsin - alongside two siblings and large, close-knit extended families. Vanessa graduated from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 2017 and I from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2014. She is a Speech Pathologist for Chicago Public Schools and I am an Institutional Cryptocurrency Broker after beginning my career as an Institutional Equity Salesman on the trading desks of SunTrust and Credit Suisse.

I proposed to Vanessa at our family cabin in Wisconsin this past 4th-of-July weekend. On our way up North, we stopped for breakfast in Madison with my brother-in-law, Naim, who had picked up the finished engagement ring and was able to unsuspectingly pass it on to me during our meal. Now that I had the ring in-hand, I began to think about where, when, and how to propose. It had been a very peaceful morning and car ride thus far. As we often did, we discussed our relationship and hopes for the future, which ended as she slowly fell asleep for the last hour of our drive. As she slept, I remember becoming overly joyful thinking about marrying Vanessa. I became so excited that I could not imagine doing anything else before proposing - everything that we had planned for the weekend now seemed so dull, pointless, and just a roadblock standing in the way of the only thing that mattered. As we turned onto the final mile of dirt road, I reached over, woke her up, and told her we were finally there. It was a beautiful, still, bright and sunny afternoon. We pulled into the driveway, parked the car, and Vanessa went around back to the trunk and began unloading our bags. I then stepped out of the driver’s side door, tried my best to slow myself down as I walked around back, and then proposed, “Vanessa, will you marry me?”