Our Story Finale...almost

Zach and I started dating again in July. We were immediately having serious conversations whenever we were together or on the phone about what we wanted in life, where the other person fit in our life plans, how we felt about each other, and what our next move was to be.

Zach had started looking for houses to buy several months before we were back together, and I had appointed myself as his real estate helper. I helped him search the web for listing and went with him to look at the houses so that I could ask the questions he wouldn't know to ask. I learned my house hunting skills from my mother. We used to move every two or three years when I was growing up. Looking for and finding a new house was so ingrained in me growing up, that when we had been in the same house for five years, I started asking when we were going to be moving because we had been there too long.

In looking at the houses, Zach always wanted to know what I thought, if I could see myself living there, that sort of thing. It was amazing how little time it took for my perspective to change (and imagine living in the houses) and for him to start suggesting that if he bought a house that needed some work, perhaps he could let me live there in exchange for helping him fix things and decorating. From there, my imagination started picturing actually living there with Zach, and it didn't seem strange, but oddly normal and right.

Zach was very smooth in his transition from talking about me living in the house he bought to me just living with him in general. I was then forced to tell him that I would never live with someone again (I did that once before and it didn't work out) before I married them. I should have known that he thought that was the perfect solution, that I should marry him. So, when we started dating again in July, we were already talking about spending our lives together, I just had no idea how short the timeline would become.

Zach found the house of his dreams shortly after we started dating again. Actually, I found the house online and fell in love with the pictures of it from the outside (that was the only thing available). I sent him the link to the house twice without realizing it. As it turned out, his friend and real estate agent Donna Lane with Carolina Realty, was the listing agent for the house. He had decided that the house was out of his budget and that he wasn't going to go look at it. She finally convinced him to go, and that was it, he fell in love.


Once Zach made an offer on the house and it was accepted, we started talking about getting engaged. I sent him links to rings that I liked online, and told him that I'd love to have an Ascher cut diamond, but also liked Emerald cuts. I also told him about my love of sapphires and my preference for platinum. Zach took these details and ran with them. He found the perfect Ascher cut diamond through Jolly's Jewelers, and asked our hometown jeweler, Daniel Evans, to make the setting. The end result was absolutely amazing. I can honestly say that I think my engagement ring is the most beautiful one that I have ever seen. I will never be jealous of anyone elses, nor can I imagine seeing something that I would like better. Zach had the perfect ring made just for me, and there isn't another like it.

My gorgeous ring.

Zach asked me to marry him the day he got the ring from Mr. Evans. That happened to be the same day that our fourth friend wedding of the year occured. Zach was one of the groomsmen, and I helped out where I could.

"Cake" topper at the fourth friend wedding of the year.

After the wedding and reception were over, we went back to Zach's father's house. He asked me to marry him on the front porch of his family home on August 2, 2008, with the help of a letter he had written. It was the most romantic thing he could have done. Zach has always been a letter writer when it came to me. He has written me many times over the years, and I have kept every one of them. This one will one day be framed, even though his handwriting is attrocious, hahaha.

We went out that night with our newly married friends to celebrate their union, and announce the impending status of our own!


After we were engaged, we talked about the date of the wedding. Because of the house, Zach didn't want to wait that long to be married. He wanted to get married and then move into the house. I have always wanted a fall wedding. It was the only kind of wedding I ever pictured having. Zach's desire for a short engagement left me with a difficult choice - have a wedding in two or three months, or get married in the spring. My mom convinced me that I could get it done in time for a fall wedding, and so we chose October 18, 2008. We became the sixth and final wedding among our friend's wedding calendar.

These are my favorites of the engagement photos.

This was the best picture I'd seen of myself in years before the wedding. And the one below was the best one I had ever seen of Zach up to that point in time.

Pictures taken by our friend Adam Casey at the Reynolda Gardens in Winston Salem, NC.

We had a beautiful ceremony and reception on a friend's farm land. It was simple, but beautiful in my opinion. It was better than I had ever imagined. I'll make a separate post about the ceremony to show off pictures.

The after wedding events are an entire story unto themselves that I will tell you about them in another post as well.

Our Story Continued...

So, the year 2008 changed everything for Zach and me. We have a close group of friends that we went through school with, and many of Zach's closest guy friends from the group decided to get married in 2008. We had five weddings on the calendar from the group of friends, and three of them were Zach's best friends.

When 2008 started, I was dating someone else, and had been for almost a year. The first wedding on the calendar came in April. I went as Zach's date because everyone sent him the invitation and knew that I would go with him. That first wedding was amazing. I was in awe of the whole thing. As Zach's date to the wedding, everyone just assumed we were together again, and it took a lot of patience to explain to everyone that we had just come as friends.

Here we are at the first wedding of 2008.

The second wedding on the calendar was in May, and was an absolutely beautiful event. When Zach and I were once again seen together by the same people who attended the first wedding, the questions came in earnest. "When are you guys getting married?" "How long have you two been together?" "Why aren't you guys dating?" "You're next, right?" Zach would smile and tell them to ask me, and then I would have to explain how we weren't together and that we were only friends. They would look at Zach (the fact that he loved me was written all over his face) and then look at me (see that I was frustrated at the inquiry) and they would tell Zach and me (mostly for Zach's benefit) that you never knew what the future held, and that everyone should start out as friends.

The hands of the happily married couple from the second wedding of 2008.

At the time of the second wedding, my then current relationship had been "in limbo", which was my fault. I had told Zach all about it, telling him that I loved my boyfriend even though most of the trouble we were having stemmed from me. I told my best friend about my relationship problems to get his opinion and advice, and what happened is that eventually Zach cried and asked me, "Why don't you love me?"

I was heartbroken when he asked me that. I did love him, I just told myself all the time that I only loved him as my best friend and not as anything more. Yet, I would have to repeatedly convince myself why I shouldn't be with Zach - the little things that irritated me about him, the reasons why it was better to have him as a friend than anything more.

When my "in limbo" relationship ended, I was out of excuses for really examining why I wasn't dating Zach. I had to be honest with myself about how I felt about him. When you are honest with yourself and really face the difficult questions that are easier to avoid than answer, it is amazing how things can change, and quickly.

More of our story...

Zach and I were only friends for a long time. That suddenly changed after a Christmas party in 2005 when he kissed me. I had had just enough wine at the party to blur the friendship line and remove whatever hesitations I would have had in crossing it, and I'm sure the same thing could be said for him, in that I don't think he would have been bold enough to make a move if he had been 100% sober.

After that kiss, we started spending more and more together time without other friends, and started dating. I lived about 45 minutes from him, and he would come up and see me during the week, and I would go back to our hometown to see him on the weekend. Somehow, though, things just weren't quite right. I knew that he loved me (though he hadn't told me that), but I still couldn't promote him past the "friend" label. I started to distance myself from him, spending less time with him, and practically avoiding him at times because I knew that I needed to end the romantic relationship and was afraid of hurting the friendship we'd had for so many years.

Zach is very insightful, and probably the most insightful man that I know. He could see that I wasn't acting normally, and he finally confronted me. I told him how I felt and that I didn't think we should date anymore. He was very upset, but he told me that he would always be there for me just as he had been until that point. We spent less and less time together, though I tried to see him every time I went back to our hometown. He sent me a card that said he had always told everyone else, but had somehow never managed to tell me that he loved me. That was the first time he told me that he loved me, and it broke my heart that I couldn't tell him I felt the same kind of love for him.

The two years after we broke up were filled with casual visits, old routines, and conversations here and there as friends. He was always there for me if I needed him, and he never let me forget that.

The year 2008 changed everything....

Our story begins...

To start off this blog, I want to give you an idea of who we are, where we've come from, and how we got to this place in our lives with my next few blog entries. My husband has been one of my best friends since middle school. We met in sixth grade through our classes together, and shared many mutual friends. Our friends formed a nerdy/unpopular kid group that consisted of 8 to 10 kids over the rest of our school years through graduation and beyond.

We both grew up in Smithfield, NC, a small semi-rural town that can be easily identified with pick-ups, tobacco, and hicks. Zach lived out in the country, and I lived downtown. We didn't start hanging out after school until he was old enough to drive, and then we would get together with friends or occasionally on our own.

He took me on a date once during our junior year, hahaha, to a small ice cream shop where he didn't say more than a dozen words to me the whole time. I couldn't figure out why he'd asked me on a date at all. I knew that he was a quiet guy, but I figured that he would have something to say if we were out together. That was the first time we ever went on a date, and it was the last one of it's kind in high school. We spent quite a bit of time together, but it was always as friends after that, because he was not able to tell me that he liked me, while I was missing the obvious. I gave him my friend label and didn't think anything else about it.

Zach has always been quirky, funny (though only when he isn't trying to be), and a great friend. He would have done anything for me growing up, and later did more for me than any other friend. I never thought that our friendship would go beyond being friends into love and eventually to a committed marriage, but I am glad that I married my best friend. Having a relationship beyond a romantic one has provided the best foundation for our marriage.

I will spend more time expanding our story throughout the next week.