In 2010, during the summer before our senior year of high school, Ryan and I both signed up for a 17-day People to People trip to Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Wales, and England. My Amarillo group ended up merging with Ryan's Houston group to form one big group for the trip. We were told to sit by someone new each day, so on our first full day of the trip Ryan asked if I wanted to sit by him on the bus as we were in line to load up. I didn't really know anyone so I was grateful to have someone to sit with. During the very long bus trip into town, we started to take selfies together and ended up with some terribly dorky photos that turns out to represent our silly relationship pretty well.

At this point, God stepped in and helped Ryan out big time. Not long into the day, Ryan's new camera that he bought just for this trip stopped working completely. Without Ryan having to ask or me having to offer, we both just understood that for the rest of the trip we would always be together so that we could take all of our photos on my camera so Ryan could have photos from the trip without having to hunt them down. For the rest of the trip we were each other's photographers.

For the rest of the trip, we were completely inseparable! We spent the whole trip together and even got several talks from the chaperones about spending too much time together and were ordered to separate for a few days.

After we returned from our trip, we continued to be friends and talked all the time. Ryan went to the University of Houston and I went to Texas Tech. I'd fly down to Houston to see Ryan and he'd meet up with me at spring break down at South Padre. By our junior year, Ryan decided he wanted to transfer from U of H and to my delight my best friend Ryan decided to come be a Red Raider with me. I had the perfect person to drag to sorority events and celebrate our graduations with.

We continued to be best friends for years, doing normal best friend things... We would cuddle up on the couch to watch TV together, go out for dinner and catch a movie, eat lunch at the SUB and the Talkington dorms every day, grocery shop together, go on vacations and road trips together, and even attend weddings and family vacations with each other's family.

Over the years, EVERYONE had told us that we'd end up together. Neither one of us put much thought into it, and just thought we'd always be friends but nothing more. That started to change once my college roommates Gina and Megan would always point out to me how we were practically already a couple just without the title. I got to thinking about how you always hear couples say, Today I get to marry my best friend, at their wedding and I realized that I could only ever truthfully say that to Ryan. We talked about trying to date and went on a picnic date the summer before my second year of law school. The picnic was great, but then we didn't put much effort into trying to date and reverted back to being just friends. Then that winter, Ryan told me he wanted to actually date and be a couple. I was so excited and the timing was perfect because Ryan had already moved back to Houston and I was moving to Dallas for a semester-long internship so Ryan no longer had to drive all the way to Lubbock to see me.

But, it was also awkward suddenly holding hands with my best friend, kissing my best friend, and eventually saying "I love you" to my best friend. Thankfully the awkwardness faded and our friendship turned into a relationship better than either one of us could have hoped for.