We met during our senior year of high school while working at Chick-fil-A. We worked together for a few years, but it wasn’t until I needed a date to my high school Sadie Hawkins dance that things began to change. I was not interested in going to the dance with anyone from my high school, so I decided to look elsewhere…and what better to find a date at Chick-fil-A? After some thought and many convincing conversations with my friends, I came up with a plan to ask Ryan. A few weeks later, while Ryan was working his shift, I made my move and asked him to the dance…he said yes.

After the dance, we kept talking and hanging out pretty often. We became close friends, and eventually, Ryan asked me to be his girlfriend after one of our track meets. He pulled out a big bouquet of flowers from his car, and we celebrated our first official date at Moe’s. It was the start of our love story, one that would grow over the next six years.

After graduating high school, we headed off to college, two hours apart. The long distance was tough at first, but we made it work. Over the next four years (including a semester in different time zones while I was studying abroad in Italy), we always made time for FaceTime calls and visited each other as much as we could until we both graduated and moved back home to start our careers. Now only 20 minutes from each other, we spent time together as much as possible to make up for lost time, playing pickleball after work, enjoying Buffalo Wild Wings on BOGO nights, going to the mall, and having many movie nights. We took a bunch of weekend trips together, Niagara Falls after our college graduation, Penn State and Kent State football games, Fallingwater, Kinzua Bridge State Park and even a week-long getaway to Ocean City. Every adventure brought us closer together.

Fast forward to our six-year anniversary, many conversations about engagement and our future were becoming more frequent. I was starting to become impatient but also excited about the thought of what our future would look like and when it would become official. I always dropped hints about rings and proposals, but Ryan kept quiet, not giving me any indication of what he could be planning. Then, during my family vacation back in June, we got dressed up to take family photos by the lake. I never suspected anything because we always get family photos every year, so I thought it was just going to be a normal photoshoot. However, to my surprise, surrounded by my family, who were all in on the set up, Ryan got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. It was the perfect moment and a day we will never forget. Cheers to the next chapter of our life together.