Perhaps unsurprisingly for a couple of University of Nebraska grads, the beginning of our relationship can be traced back to a Husker football game. Hanna and I first met in 2013, when she was working as a suite hostess at Memorial Stadium. My parents had purchased a couple of tickets in one of the new suites that year, but had failed to mention the cute hostess working there. Eventually, I was able to be in the suite for a game, and found myself focusing far more on trying to make conversation with the cute girl than on the game itself. I don't think either of us walked away terribly impressed by my flirting skills, but it was enough to at least break the ice.

Fast forward a few months, and we came across each other again during a Phi Delta Theta + Delta Gamma ski trip in Breckenridge in January 2014. The overly crowded mountain cabin wasn't exactly a breeding ground for romance, but Hanna made a strong impression by stealing a large armchair I had slept in the first night, relegating me to a spot on the tile floor underneath the pool table in the basement. That personal affront aside, we were able to bond over our mutual love of being in the mountains and our mutual disdain for the ongoing shenanigans by others in the house. Did I ditch her to go to Beaver Creek the last night we were there? Perhaps, but it felt fair after her hostile takeover of my sleeping spot.

A month or so later, I felt we had done just enough communicating to merit my sending her a Facebook message (the most romantic messaging platform) asking her to go to a formal, to which she surprisingly obliged. She still has that message saved, which makes me cringe to this day.

From there, we began seeing each other more and more frequently, and on March 12, 2014, we established that we were, in fact, dating.

We managed to carry on as Hanna finished school and moved up to Bellevue to begin a career teaching elementary special education, which provides her with the daily training necessary to deal with me. Around this time, Hanna began coming on trips out to Colorado with my family, taking up snowboarding (briefly) and skiing (which she vastly prefers).

After I graduated, I took the opportunity to move out to Colorado to teach snowboarding, something I had always dreamed of doing. Of course, this was extremely difficult for our relationship, even if Hanna was able to visit a few times over the course of the ski season. I'll be forever grateful for her patience, which I have asked her to display on numerous occasions.

A few years later, we had both finished grad school (which included me spending a short stint living in Philadelphia), and were living together in Papillion. I finally got a grown up job in Omaha, and we began to really look at our long term future together. We bought a house together not long after, and I finally got the guts to buy a ring and propose, nearly ten years after that fateful meeting in Suite 576.