Our Engagement Story: Jennifer and Matt

There are a few things in a woman’s life that she dreams about since she was a little girl. Being proposed to is one of them. It’s 4 months after I got engaged to the love of my life and I still cannot believe how surreal everything feels. I have been anticipating writing this blog post for a while, so where do I begin?

Preface: How we met

I have to preface our engagement story with a quick overview of our love story and how we met. In October 2016, I flew to California to attend the annual Poshmark conference (PoshFest) in Los Angeles. I had recently come out of a long relationship and I wasn’t in the best of spirits, so that trip came very close to not happening. I decided I would focus on myself and my business so I took a leap of faith and got on the plane by myself to go to the conference and spend some time with a few friends I knew there. After the conference, I extended my stay and drove down to San Diego. A friend invited me to a casual house gathering and that was the night it happened. I met the man of my dreams. We started talking and seemed to hit it off fairly quickly. There was something different about him, it was hard to explain what, it was just a feeling. Sadly, it was my last night in California before I flew back home. We exchanged numbers and messaged each other off and on for about 8 months. It was nothing serious, we didn’t even have intentions of visiting each other. I’d call it more casual conversations.

Fast forward to July 2017, my best friend and I decided to have a few weeks of summer adventure traveling. One of the places on our list was California (I fell in love with it on the first trip and wanted to go back so badly!), so we went to LA and San Diego, again. I messaged Matt a few weeks beforehand saying I’d be in San Diego and maybe we could get together. I sort of forgot about that while on the trip though, haha! On our last day in LA, we decided we wanted an hour more of relaxation at the pool in my friend’s apartment complex we were staying in so we changed our train time to an hour later. In that time, a man had come up to me at the pool asking to use the bathroom key. He never came back. I figured he lived there and just forgot the downstairs bathroom key- WRONGO! Lesson learned. We were freaking out because we had very little time left to go shower and get our bags ready and head to the train station. We had to go to the main lobby and I had to pay for my friend to get a new key. Long story short, we had to throw everything in our bags, put some yoga pants on and rush in an Uber to the train station. PHEW. We JUST made it. We picked up a quick Subway sandwich and got our butts on that train. I literally felt so flustered and out of breath!

Around 30 minutes passed and I decided to take some Snapchat videos out the window of the beautiful coastline. A few moments later, a message pops up from Matt with the same view out the window saying “How’s your view?”. Um, what? It took me a minute to comprehend that he WAS ON THE SAME TRAIN. He asked what car we were in and I immediately starting feeling flustered again. I turned to my friend and said “OMG, this guy I met last year is on the same train as us!” and gave her all the details. I was so nervous about it that I told him I was going to probably take a nap first (I mean I had no makeup on, hair was a mess, yoga pants…who wants to run into someone like that?!). He ended up convincing me to say hi, so he came down and hung out with us for a while. SAME. WEIRD. FEELING. Like I connected with him right on the spot. The train ended up stalling several times and we were delayed at least two hours! It gave us more time to talk (and silently make fun of the annoying bro-like California boy accents in front of us!). Once our train finally arrived at the station in Old Town, we all took an Uber together and Matt offered to give us a ride in his convertible. He took us to Mount Soledad to see the gorgeous view of the city and then we grabbed tacos at Ortiz’s in Pacific Beach. When he left, we said that we’d hang out again that week. And we did. Almost every day… We had our first kiss under the pier in Pacific Beach and everything about it was perfect. Ladies and gentlemen, I knew on that trip that he was someone special. It didn’t take long at all.

So what happened after that week? Long story short, I spent the next 7-8 months flying out to California every several weeks until I finally moved to California. Our first trip seeing each other again was in New Orleans (4 months later). It was pretty obvious he was the one. Over time, we both knew it deep down. The universe has a funny way of putting everything into motion at the right time and place. The guy at the pool? The train delay? I also had an entire year being single to sort myself out and really become the strong person I wanted to be and that I knew would be right for “the one” IF he ever came along. Trust me, I WAS NOT thinking about finding a guy when I met Matt again. It just happened.

3 Weeks Prior to the Proposal

Almost one year after moving to California, one of the best days of my life happened. Let’s start off a few weeks prior to the proposal. I was sitting in the kitchen working when Matt answered his phone. You know when you can hear the person on the other end of the phone even when it’s not on speakerphone because the volume is up so loud? Well, Matt’s mom called him and the first thing she said was “Did you get the ring?!”.

I’m sorry…WHAT?

My heart stopped and my stomach flipped. I couldn’t believe what I just heard. He started walking out of the room and out on our balcony and closed the door (as if I couldn’t hear). I heard enough small details to know that a proposal was going to be happening! Eeeep! Of course I didn’t know when this was going to occur, but I had a strong feeling it would be when we were going home to visit family on the East Coast a few weeks later. I couldn’t contain my excitement! I called my best friend and my mom. It turned out later my mom and friend both already knew about it and played along with me, haha. My friend was so mad at Matt for ruining the surprise for me that she called him and told him I knew. Ok, I’ll admit I was SUPER ANGRY with her at first because I thought it was going to hurt his feelings. She eventually convinced me that I should just relax and forget about it for now because I wouldn’t know when it was happening and I shouldn’t be disappointed if it didn’t happen that soon.

How was I suppose to just temporarily forget about that?!

Well. I did, kind of. I stopped wondering if it would happen at any second. Alright, let’s get to the GOOD PART!

The Proposal – July 9, 2019

One of our plans while we were visiting Virginia was to look at neighborhoods in the city we thought about moving to at some point. We decided to make a whole day of it. We drove around, looked at homes and stopped for lunch. Matt had mentioned a few times during the day that we should check out the river and maybe have a snack and walk around before we went home. I thought that was a great idea and thought absolutely nothing of it! Like I said, I wasn’t expecting it to happen on that trip anymore. Well, boy was I wrong!

We parked the car and walked to the river. It had rained a few days before so the grounds were still muddy. He kept walking ahead of me near a secluded forest area next to the river. I said “umm, I don’t know if I want to walk in here it’s all muddy”. He convinced me of course and then we stopped by the water’s edge and enjoyed how pretty it was. A few minutes later, he hugged me and looked at me for few moments and said “You know I love you very much, right?”, got down on one knee and said “and I was wondering if you would make the happiest man alive”? EEEEEEEP! He pulled out the most gorgeous princess cut diamond ring and I started tearing up. I was STILL surprised! It truly is an overwhelming feeling. Ladies, you can imagine over and over how that moment will feel, but until it happens you can never really know!

I’m so excited to share wedding planning posts with all of you over the next year. I hope it will give all of you inspiration too for your dream wedding!

My final advice for future brides would be to definitely book your engagement session with the photographer who is shooting your wedding day. Nick was the best decision we made for our engagement photos and he is actually going to be shooting our video on our wedding day. We hadn’t booked our wedding day photographer until a few months after this shoot. I would highly recommend it so that both parties can get to know each other and feel comfortable before the big day!

THE END. This post was a long one and I truly enjoyed going through each of these photos again. Thank you guys for taking the time to read it. I hope it provided some inspiration for your engagement photos, comment below and share them with me! I’d love to see <3

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Our Engagement Photos