Elizabeth & Dean

How they met…

​We actually met back in third grade at Lodi Elementary. We started dating in the winter of our senior year.

The proposal…

This is a STORY! After we graduated high school, Dean went off to the University of Toledo and I attended Miami University in Oxford, OH. We continued dating and graduated in 2017. The following Spring, we planned a trip to Paris, France and Valencia, Spain to visit one of my best friends from college. I had an inkling that Dean was going to propose in my dream place – Paris, but had no hard evidence. The trip was a disaster! We were on our way to Paris, when we missed our second flight and had a layover in the airport for another six hours. We finally got onto the crammed flight and arrived in Paris after 24 hours of traveling, only to have Dean stopped at customs and taken to a questioning room. He had brought the wrong passport. When he first applied for his passport, it was lost in the mail. He reported it lost, to get a new one. Somehow, the new one and the old one showed up at his home around the same time frame – his mom took one passport and put it one safe and Dean took the other and put it in the other safe. There was a miscommunication and he brought the “lost” passport to Europe. After hours of waiting in customs in Paris, Dean was deported and I flew back to NYC with him.

We knew we still had a whole trip ahead of us, so we decided we would have his real passport overnighted to us and leave the next day for Paris to try to piece together this amazing trip we had planned. When we got back to NYC, we found out that our flights were taken to send us back home, our luggage was lost in Paris, and it would cost us three times as much as our whole trip to fly home. Needless to say, we did not make it to Paris and Spain. We got a hotel in NYC for a few days and did some touristy things there! Dean and I were taking a selfie in Central Park, when a random stranger came up and offered to take our photo. After she took a few, Dean looked at me and said “You hated those, didn’t you?” I told him yes, but that it was okay. He called the stranger back over to take another photo. I was mortified, but she was very willing. With that chance, Dean got down on one knee and proposed!! It was the most ridiculous few days of our lives, with the most wonderful of endings!!

Favorite wedding memory…

The feeling of having all of our family and friends in one place at a time is the most wonderful memory. We couldn’t have asked for a more wonderful support system than what we have!