The Story of How We Began...

It took a long time for Josh and I to find each other. It started with a good friend of mine who told me about a ward that had a lot of "mid" singles in it and encouraged me to try it out. Unfortunately I was a hard one to convince! I had spent over a decade in singles wards to no avail so I had very little hope that this ward would be any different. She worked on me for about 6 months before I finally decided that it was worth a shot and that if anything I needed to show that I wasn't giving up and was still willing to do whatever it took to be in the right place. I started attending the ward and Josh moved into the ward a few months later. We met soon after. Our first date wasn't until six months later though. In the mean time we spent a lot of time getting to know each other, talking, flirting, you know ;). As Josh says, he was catching me in his tractor-beam of charm. He did a pretty good job of it too! I have so many stories from those months before our first date - I like to give Josh crap about some of them! Well, most of them! He liked to sit with me in class and put his arm around my chair. Everyone knew there was this boy that put his arm around my chair every Sunday. In fact the first time my sister-in-law met Josh she had to ask what his actual name was because she only knew him as "Arm Boy"! So when we finally went out on a date we already knew a lot about each other. It was the best first date I had ever been on and little did I know it was going to be my last! That night as I was getting into bed, my sister (who was also my room-mate) whispered something as she left my room. I asked her what she had said and she said she was just trying out my new name (!). Apparently I was giving off some pretty promising vibes! Thanksgiving was the turning point for us. Things began to go really fast after that which was not typical for either of us. I had never reacted to anyone like I was to Josh and I felt a little like I was having an out-of-body experience, like I was watching myself in a movie! But it was really happening! Josh had already planned a trip back home to Texas for Christmas and New Years and was going to be gone for 10 days. I knew there was no way I was going to sit around on New Years without him so I decided to fly out to Texas to be with him and to meet his family. That trip was the most amazing experience I had ever had. People always said that when the right person came along "you would know" and we both had struggled with what that really meant because obviously neither of us had ever experienced it before. Well I knew exactly what it meant then. Josh's sister mentioned on my first night there that they were planning on a vacation the next June and wanted Josh to join them like he had previously and commented that maybe if we had come to an "arrangement" by then I could join them too. At that moment it became very obvious to me that I wanted to marry Josh and that it needed to happen long before June! I couldn't say anything at that moment so that night after everyone else had gone to bed I told Josh that I wanted to marry him and that I didn't want to wait until June. What a glorious moment that was! The next day was New Year's Eve and after all the festivities had ended we stayed up for a while and just talked and shared our thoughts and feelings and started to make some general plans. We were married the following April in the Draper Utah LDS temple and I will be forever grateful for the path that we decided to take together!