The year was 2015: My best friend Tori and I had just moved into the Darley North dorm at the University of Colorado Boulder. We were ready to take on the world... and battle the smells and noise of living on an all-boys floor.


Tori managed to find two tidier Texan boys who could help her with biology homework, and one of them happened to be a boy named Jonathan Schutt.


One day, as the social butterfly she is, she invited everyone to go to Frightmare — a local haunted house. Now, I hate haunted houses, but I was a newly minted college student and wanted to prove that I could be adventurous and fun. As our group approached the entrance, all my bravery and pride disappeared, and I buried my head into the back of the first person in front of me — Jon.


Jon politely guided me through the whole house, reassuring me that I was OK, all while I profusely sweated all over his shirt. Even after all that, he still sat by me at dinner.


We decided to make it official on Halloween and attempted to survive all the ups and downs that came with freshman year. Eventually, we ended things. We were young and it just wasnt the right time.


Fast forward a year and a half later. I went to the Buff Pool (a buffalo-shaped pool at our university) with my best friend Sam to tan and study, as college students do. Lo and behold, after several months of somehow never running into each other, Jon was the lifeguard on duty.


He had grown a very interesting beard... but I had decided (and got a big push from Sam) to go up and say hi. Jon was a little standoffish and didnt really respond to any of my questions. So, I went home thinking that was the end of that chapter.


However, later that day, I got a new friend request from a Jon Schutt on Snapchat. I accepted and we started chatting again. We talked about everything that happened in the last year and a half, how wed grown and apologized for the mistakes we made in our initial relationship.


We decided to try the relationship thing one more time... and the rest is history.


Since then, we graduated college, moved out of Boulder and to Denver into our first two apartments, bought our first house in Englewood, started our careers and even traveled the world — from Amsterdam to Sweden to Iceland in Europe to Zion, New York City and even Columbus, Ohio.


Jon is always down to join in on any crazy ideas I have. We have gone to nearly 20 concerts together, hiked seven 14,000-foot mountains, fished, snowshoed, ran and paddle-boarded together.


In the past 10 years, we have grown so much together, and I cant wait to see where we go in the next 70 years.


To all our friends and family who have watched us grow through the good and the not-so-good, thank you for always being by our side.