Facebook has informed me that our engagement pictures were taken four years ago yesterday! Pretty neat, huh?
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| Here's one of our outtake pictures. There are several where we look strange and/or awkward. |
Chapter One: BYU Beginnings
We have perhaps the most unoriginal answer to "Where did you meet?" that you can get from an LDS couple. Yes, we were in the same ward at BYU. Not a very exciting start to this story, but I promise it does get more interesting.
For my second year at BYU, I made plans to room with my childhood best friend. We were choosing an apartment in the building she'd lived in previously and I suggested we choose one that was on the third floor on the right side, just like where the sorcerer's stone was kept at Hogwarts in the first Harry Potter book. Seriously, that's how we ended up in that specific apartment.
My oldest brother's family was visiting Provo for a little while right before the semester started. Since my parents were bringing me there soon anyway, we spent time with them and I stayed with the group until I was able to move in to my apartment. I was in town earlier than the general student population and things were pretty quiet. A few other people in the ward had moved in and decided to have a get-together on our first Monday night since we didn't have FHE groups yet. (Side note: I think most people who read this know about FHE, but I'll give a quick explanation just in case. Family home evening is a sort of tradition where families spend time with each other once a week to do various activities. At BYU, wards of single people will organize faux families so that they can still have weekly fun with people they care about.)
At our little gathering of early returners, there was a certain guy that I befriended. Ready for a plot twist? It wasn't Jared. The guy unfriended me two or three years ago and I'd feel bad including his name here without him knowing, so I'll refer to him as Not Jared or NJ. We realized we had some similar interests and started spending time together. One of his roommates was one of the few people from my previous BYU ward who wasn't on a mission at that point, which was a fun realization!
On the Sunday night before the semester started, our newly assembled ward had its first ward prayer. (Basically, everyone gets together for a spiritual thought, announcements, and a prayer each Sunday night.) The bishop told everyone to say their name, where they were from, and something about themselves. Jared was one of the first people to have to do that and didn't have a whole lot of time to think about what to say, so his interesting fact was that he's a brony. I was surprised and excited to find someone else who enjoys My Little Pony, so once the prayer was said, I went over to talk to him and show him that I had a Twilight Sparkle keychain on my lanyard. He told me that there was an unofficial BYU Bronies club and that he'd let me know about the activities they were having. Since we're both rather awkward people, I think that was pretty much the extent of our first conversation.
The way that ward organized its FHE groups was by apartment. The ratio of girls and boys was still a bit wonky because of the change in missionary age requirements, so each girl apartment had two guy apartments of "FHE brothers." It just so happened that my apartment and Jared's apartment were in the same FHE group! That meant we were slowly getting to know each other through our weekly activities while I was also going on occasional dates with Not Jared.
In September, at some kind of ward food-related thing, I was sitting with NJ when Jared came over to tell me about an upcoming BYU Bronies excursion to go see the new MLP movie. He looked over at NJ and mentioned that he could come, too, but NJ didn't particularly want to go watch a movie about animated human-ponies forming a band.
I guess going to see Rainbow Rocks with the BYU Bronies was kind of our first date, though not intentionally. We met up with the group on a Saturday morning, drove to Salt Lake City, saw the movie, played laser tag, drove back to Provo, hung out in someone's apartment clubhouse thing (?) for a few hours playing pony-related games, and eventually went back home. I didn't know anybody else in the group and basically stuck with Jared for that whole day. (Also, I got the highest score in the laser tag game. Just thought I'd brag about that.)
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| One of the things happening at the post-movie activity in Provo was a station where you could get a glittery tattoo of one of the ponies' cutie marks. That's Jared's shoe in the top right of the picture! (If I remember correctly, he got Rarity's cutie mark glittered onto his arm.) |
NJ and I were still dating at this point. We went to BYU's homecoming dance together and had coordinating Halloween costumes. I decided to end the relationship pretty soon after Halloween, though. He's a very nice guy, it just wasn't a perfect match. We had an amicable split, which is fortunate since we'd already signed up to take a math class together during winter semester. (It seemed like a good idea at the time.)
There was a stake conference held in the Mariott Center in early November and I ended up talking to Jared on the walk over there since our FHE group met up to go together. I somehow found myself sitting between Jared and his brother (who was also his roommate) for that meeting. I texted him later that night to bug him about coming to choir practice on behalf of my choir director roommate. We kept talking and he mentioned at one point that he still hadn't seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier. We made plans to watch that together while continuing to message back and forth. The conversation lasted from about midnight until I had to walk to campus the next morning. (Sorry, Mom. My sleeping schedule is considerably better these days.)
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Chapter Two: Making It Official
The first date we had that was planned as a date was watching Winter Soldier together with hot cocoa and snacks in mid-November. The time between me dating NJ and starting to date Jared is suspiciously short, I know, but that wasn't my plan. I promise I didn't break up with NJ so that I could date Jared instead. Anyway, we decided after our Winter Soldier date that we wanted to go on more dates, and we did! By Thanksgiving, we were officially "a couple" and had a marathon of X-Men movies before he left to spend the holiday with his grandparents in Salt Lake City. I'm told he blushed when Grandma asked if he was dating anybody, though he denies this.
Our relationship became "Facebook official" in December after we went to Temple Square together to see the lights. I remember having a conversation while we rode the FrontRunner back to Provo about how it was probably time to make things known since we'd been dating for about a month.
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| Despite being anxious about relying on unfamiliar public transportation to take us on a decently long journey, this was a fun night! |
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Chapter Three: Pony Proposal
We went shopping for rings in January and, awkwardly enough, bumped into his non-roommate brother while going back to our apartment buildings once we'd bought my ring. I'd just met that brother for the first time a few days prior to that at a birthday party we had for Jared, so that was exciting. (Hi, remember me? I'm marrying your brother. Want to see the ring?) We decided that proposing on Valentine's Day would be silly and impractical since we had a BYU Bronies party to go to that day and Batman movies to watch. The next Monday was a day with no classes, though, so we agreed that it would be a good day to officially get engaged.
When things were set up properly, Jared texted me to look outside the front door of my apartment, where I discovered a Twilight Sparkle plushie with a printed speech bubble instructing me to go upstairs to find a line of even more ponies with speech bubbles.
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| Each pony had something to say to me as I got closer to the room where Jared was waiting. |
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| Jared looks super young and I look like I have a partial eyebrow. I had not yet discovered that light eyebrow hairs aren't super visible from a distance and/or in certain lighting. |
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| I think Lady Gaga announced her engagement on the same day we did. We actually got married and stayed together, though. Also, throwback to before my hands were always covered in eczema patches. Those were the days... |
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Chapter Four: The Summer of Skype
Since the wedding wasn't until August and traveling across the country is a giant pain, we had to spend about a hundred days far away from each other after winter semester ended. Of course, those hundred days were packed with wedding preparations and family visits, so I had plenty of ways to distract myself from how much I missed seeing Jared every day. I'm really glad we live in a time where it was easy to text and even do video chats; if we had to rely on snail mail and phone calls, I would've gone even more crazy than I already did.
One of my many wedding prep tasks was to get Jared's ring resized (to size 9 3/4, I'm not even kidding) and I wanted to have it engraved, too. The inside of his ring says "The Unbreakable Vow" because I couldn't help myself.
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Chapter Five: Happily Ever After
After what felt like forever, we were reunited and got married in the Washington, D.C. temple! It was the first time all of my parents' kids were in one place since a different wedding back in 2009, which was another thing to be super happy about. (That unusual phenomenon will happen again this summer at a reunion! Yay!)
Our post-wedding adventures included a reception in Virginia, attending Bronycon in Baltimore, and another reception in Washington. Jared's wonderful parents drove the car that he'd bought that summer all the way across the country for us so that we'd only need to get it from Washington to Utah. We survived our first road trip and the discomfort of moving into a third-floor apartment with no air conditioning in mid-August. We also survived sleeping on a twin air mattress for the first week of living in that apartment since we didn't have an actual bed yet. Ah, college...
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Is anyone surprised that Harry Potter, MLP, and Marvel all played roles in bringing us together? Probably not. Oh, and here's another fun fact: Jared and I are not the only people from that FHE/friend group that married each other. People joke that everything a YSA ward does is intended to get everyone to date and/or marry someone, but sometimes that's what actually happens.
It was a lot of fun to look through old messages and pictures to make sure I was getting the timeline right! Hopefully it was also enjoyable to read this summary of the events leading to our marriage. Have a great day and remember that friendship is magic! :)
Love,
Lizzie
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