Hannah and I met way back in high school, where we would run into each other every year for a few days when our churches would meet for a joint youth retreat. She’s from Louisville Kentucky, and I am a Columbus boy. She’ll tell you that she remembers me as the loud guy and I remember her as the quiet girl.

We reconnected briefly when we both went to OSU, but rarely crossed paths – apparently I passed her a number of times on my longboard, glassy eyed and zoned out. Regardless, we were never close, and I left Columbus for medical school in Athens, Ohio during her sophomore year.

The stars finally aligned when we incidentally were helping a mutual friend with her wedding in Columbus. Hannah was working on makeup for the girls, and I was using my loudness for a good purpose by emcee-ing the reception. The wedding was an exciting blur and at the end of the day I remember looking at her and thinking I should reach out because she looked incredibly pretty in her black jumpsuit. I approached her twice at the after party, full of confidence, and struck out both times. I thought I had lost my touch – Hannah later would reassure me she was so tired from the work of the day she only had eyes for the cheese cubes.

Luckily, her friends were excellent wing-women, and she was receptive to a date a few weeks later. I very quickly learned she is not quiet at all – on that first date she connected her phone to the Bluetooth and blared electronic dance music as I gripped my steering wheel and struggled to focus on the road. At the end of the summer I asked her family for their approval to date her, and expressed that I wanted to date her with the intention of determining our compatibility for marriage.

We dated for the last three years. We went through the COVID pandemic and she helped me through the last two years of medical school, and then after she graduated from OSU we worked together and joyfully celebrated when she was accepted into doctorate school herself. We have nearly always been long distance, and we have always made the most of any time we spent together: we traveled to Greece, New York, New Mexico, and Athens.

In fall of 2022 I sat down and made the decision that I was uninterested in a life apart from Hannah, and started to shake down my friends to make sure she got the proposal of her dreams. Between her Pinterest and a horde of her girlfriends, I got her a ring I was sure she’d like and proposed February 11th of 2023 at Mirror Lake on OSU campus, a site where we’d had some of our first dates. In classic Hannah nature, she didn’t realize the flowers that I’d laid out were for her until I was down on a knee.