Ben and I met in October of 2019 through Hinge. We had been talking for a day before he dove right in and asked me on a date. We met at a funky cocktail bar for overpriced/terrible charcuterie (that we both pretended to like but now joke about how awful it was). Despite the fact that the actual meal was terrible, we stayed and chatted for hours until it was no longer acceptable to continue taking up a table without ordering more food. I messaged Ben after the date to thank him and suggested we get together again but didn’t hear back. I assumed at that point that the feeling must not have been mutual! The next morning I received a messaged saying he had arrived at the restaurant and had got us a spot in the back left corner. I had been having terrible luck with the dating scene, so naturally, I assumed that he had accidentally messaged me and was on a date with someone else! After some teasing and a few convincing text messages, he finally had me believing that the message was in fact intended for me the previous night but didn’t go through. That afternoon he ended up joining me and a group of my friends for drinks downtown, and from that point on we were inseparable. Our lives fit together so easily that at no point did we ever question that this wasn’t meant to be.

We moved in together that spring, bought a house the following summer, and got engaged in Kelowna shortly after buying our house. We had booked our wedding venue and photographer (yay!) before we actually got engaged! Despite the fact that I saw it coming, our engagement was still one of the happiest days of my life. We had planned a trip to Kelowna and Ben proposed at Meadow Vista Honey Wines. I was so excited that I don’t actually remember anything he said, and neither does he because he was so flustered! We spent a good hour ugly crying (mostly Jill) and ate barely anything from the beautiful picnic they had set up for us.

We will be getting married July 22, 2023 at The Inn on Officer’s Garden in Calgary. We decided to go with a longer engagement seeing that we still haven’t had the chance to travel together due to the pandemic. Our wedding will be a mix of vintage 1950’s glamour and French countryside, with a pale blue and peach colour scheme. We loved this venue because it has a beautiful outdoor courtyard for the ceremony, a patio and sunroom for the cocktail hour, and an old elegant banquet room for the reception.