(The picture above is the first photo we took together a week after Alex asked me to be his girlfriend : August 2019)

So, if we’re going to tell our story, we have to start from the beginning.

Our story starts back in the spring of 2019. When people ask us how we met, we always say we met through mutual friends, or through church, but I think it really ended up being a combination of both. At the time, I had recently started attending the same church that Alex had been going to for a few years. Let’s just say that during that time, Alex recognized me for a while and I essentially never noticed him... like at all.

At the end of the spring, Alex reached out to me on social media about a documentary I was watching. At the time, we knew of each other, but by no means were we good friends or anything. Again, I barely knew Alex or anything about him. I genuinely thought he was just curious and wanted my opinion on the series, what I liked about it, what I didn't - you know, the usual things. And maybe in some version of this story that we're telling, he actually did want my opinion. But to be clear... that's definitely not why he initiated that conversation.

We ended up talking for hours about the documentary, which led to a series of conversations about things that make us laugh and things we love to do. I was the one who actually asked for Alex's phone number, which then led to a series of dinner FaceTime conversations about our long days and sweet talks about our lives. I always say that details are what make a person, and I think discovering the details about one another was one of the many things that made us fall in love with each other that summer.

Although being in two different cities that entire summer, we spent all of it getting to know each other. It was thrilling, and equally beautiful, how natural it was for us to become each other’s best friend. At one point in time, we were living our lives completely separate from each other and within a matter of weeks everything changed.

At the end of the summer of 2019, we sat on Alex’s back porch for three hours and talked about how much we liked each other. Alex described every detail of how he wanted to pursue me, do life with me and be intentional with my heart. I described how serious I wanted to take our pursuit of one another and my desire for us to grow together. We really rested in the fact that dating was for pursuing oneness in the future, not just another thing to do because it's fun.

It was that sweet summer night when Alex asked me to be his girlfriend, and the rest is truly history.

So many details of our love story exist between the then and the now. And if you sit down with us long enough, you can get alllll the details of the fun we have, the challenges we face, and the reality of being complete opposites and finding rhythms within our relationship. And through all of that, you'll find how the Lord has just consistently and patiently showed up for us and taught us how to love one another better every day.

Here we are three years later. One thing about us is that we are never in a rush to get where we are going. Although we haven't always gotten it right, we've found that we receive much more joy in letting the Lord set the pace of our relationship - and that is something that will never change.

We are so thrilled that we get to spend the rest of our lives together. Here’s to us - the future Prioleau’s!

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