Our Love Story
We dated through summer and fall, going to improv shows, cooking dinners, and laughing hysterically over Black Books, but the timing just wasn’t right. We were both thinking about it, but we never managed to put the words “Let’s,” “be,” and “girlfriends” into the same sentence. By 2012 we drifted apart, but we stayed friends on Facebook. And we kept each other’s numbers.
Season 2
Steph and Michelle’s relationship wasn’t more than the occasional “like” for years. Then, starting in 2015, Michelle was posting more and more pictures of Smokey, her parents’ uncommonly beautiful cat.
Before long, Steph, a connoisseur of cats, was commenting on nearly every photo. Michelle appreciated the admiration, and wondered again how she and Steph had never made themselves official. Facebook algorithms began to work their magic, and soon they were following each other’s every post.
After a while, Steph re-developed a big crush on Michelle. (Michelle just thought Steph really liked cats!) After a few false starts, Steph worked up the courage to confess her feelings on February 13, 2017. Michelle was flattered, and we set a second first date for February 17. That was the beginning of what we would call our “Season 2”: we’d gotten renewed.
Our second time at dating, everything was smoother. We’d both changed and matured since Season 1. And we were better at communicating. After a romantic date to see Beauty and the Beast, a surprise delivery of macarons, and a realization that Steph was the first person Michelle wanted to turn to in an emergency, we put everything out in the open on March 31 – we became girlfriends.
After that, things just kept getting better. Not that we’d seen the end of our personal crises, because there would be plenty more during our first year together. Yet through every hardship, setback, and dark day, we were each other’s constant.
When our leases came up, there was no reason to wait. We were ready to live together. And we were ready to start a family: When we saw Merry and Pippin (then known as Fabio and Monty) posted for adoption, it was love at first sight.
Combining households and adopting a bonded pair of kittens was a serious step (so were the vet bills!). But we were ready for it, and soon we’d be ready for the next. By New Year’s, we’d agreed that after a little more time as housemates, and a little more stashed away in our savings accounts, we’d get engaged. We picked out our rings.
Season 3
The proposal came on Michelle’s birthday: June 6, 2018. We were in the middle of a vacation with Michelle’s mom’s family on the Oregon coast, and we’d just spent a perfect day in Portland, smelling the roses at the International Rose Test Garden and buying way too many books at Powell’s.
Steph asked Michelle to sit by the big ocean-view window (upstairs, alone) to open her present.
