Written by Austin:

Here we are as the end of this chapter closes, and we prepare to step into our next chapter together, marriage. What a year it's been. When we first met for a date up in The Bay Area back in February 2020, we were complete strangers, not having a clue what would lie ahead for us. With some (probably all of the) help from Hinge, an online dating app, we were both pleasantly surprised to find each other amidst our busy and very separate lives. While getting to know strangers is not easy or comfortable, we found that it was both an excitement and joy to learn more and more about the other through our first few dates.

The beginning of our dating was such a wonderful and treasured time to always look back on as we started to fall in love with the others’ character and hearts. That being said, we have quickly learned to have to find the joy in our relationships amidst the storms of this last year. Aside from the first three weeks of dating, our relationship has had to grow along with the rest of the world alongside the pandemic. While we have been faced with the general hardships such as fears of health, jobs, and uncertainties, we feel confident that our love has been able to grow all the more in this last year. We have discovered what it means to love each other through job loss, new jobs, and uncertainty of career paths. It is not how either of us thought we would spend our first year, but we both hold on to faith that love shines in darker times. And it has by no means been only dark days. Although we have mostly been isolated to the Bay Area for the past year, we have also had the blessings of being able to share each others’ wonderful families and childhood friends, experience a beautiful engagement at the end of 2020, and countless days of laughs and love on the “ordinary” days. We pray that whatever days may lie ahead, that we are someday able to look back and have some additional chapters and still say, “but the greatest of these is love”.

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