Ashford Estate Wedding :: Kelly & Tim

We met right after I graduated college and Tim was in his senior year at West Point. One of my friends (who is still a dear friend and at our wedding) was dating someone at West Point and asked if a few of us wanted to go up for a weekend. We got a group of girls together and went up. The weekend was nothing too special, just a night out at the bars, but somewhere along the way Tim and I met. We flirted at the bar and one of the girls we were with stole his hat. Ultimately, nothing much happened that night but afterwards I used the excuse of the hat to message Tim on facebook. I was leaving to volunteer for a few months in Africa almost immediately after. We kept in touch as pen pals throughout that time ( I was totally crushing ) but by the time I got back 6 months later Tim was dating someone else. We intermittently kept in touch over the next few years- after Tim graduated he deployed to Afghanistan and I remember sending him care packages- although we were still just friends. This kind of contact was ongoing for a few years. At some point it became clear that Tim was very interested in getting together (now single at the time), but by that point I was in medical school and very busy and in and out of relationships. One weekend after multiple random facebook conversations, Tim asked me to visit ocean city, MD to hang with some of his high school friends at a hotel. He picked me up from my temporary home in Philly and we made our way down- only for me to watch us pull up to a quiet home- his parents. He hadn’t told me nor them that we would be spending the weekend with his parents….Thankfully they were gracious and it all went well. Still just friends but with some chemistry, we had a great weekend. We had a lot more online conversation and at some point a first kiss happened. For the next few years Tim pursued me and was always asking to hang out but I was too busy. He had almost given up until one night while he was deployed in Korea I reached out with a lame text message telling him “sometimes I think about us.” It sounds horrible but he broke things off with his (different) girlfriend at the time that day. He returned home a few weeks later and visited me in Allentown, PA immediately after he got home and then again 3 days later (a long drive from Maryland). That was when we started dating- we fell in love over the course of the next 3 years, with Tim living in Ft Hood Texas and me in Allentown, PA while I finished my residency and Tim finished his service for the army. Long distance turned to short when Tim got a job in NYC and we lived together in Jersey City- where he popped the question and we planned the wedding

Family, the meaning behind the ceremony, friends, everyone having a good time!, learning about how each other person approached decisions

Seeing all of our friends and family together all so happy; seeing each other for the first time that day, the speeches….wait, actually everything. It was the perfect day.

Like walking on a cloud.