As a couples portrait + wedding photographer, obviously I love the stories of romance. I always have. From the middle school days of playing M.A.S.H. to find out who I would marry, to watching A Walk to Remember so many times, to religiously reading every Nicholas Sparks book ever written, to even writing a romance-themed novella in a college creative writing class… there is just something about love stories that has always meant so much to me. I love hearing stories of how two people meet and when they realize they are going to spend the rest of their lives together. I know I am not the only one who loves these stories, so I decided to share ours!
(Warning: the photos I share in these posts will be neither flattering nor good quality)
Part 1: The Cute Meet
Remember how I said I loved romance? Of course, the classic movie The Holiday made the list of favorite movies. I even had a girl’s night at my house in high school where we watched it on a big inflatable screen in my parent’s backyard! In this movie, the quirky writer Arthur mentions the “cute meet,” which is the moment the main characters in a love story meet in a memorable way. One of my favorite cute meets is in the movie About Time when Tim and Mary meet; if you haven’t seen it stop reading this post and go watch it because it is the BEST.
Anyway… I would love to tell you that the first time I saw Will he was so dreamy and we immediately fell in love. However, that was not the case. To be honest, I don’t even remember the first time we met, but it was probably at homeschool testing. My family moved to our small town in West Virginia when I was in 8th grade. I was homeschooled at the time, and leaving my friends was devastating. I was so eager to make friends but had a hard time doing so in that first year.
In this small town, there was quite a large home school community. This community came together once a year for standardized testing. It was kind of a big deal. Once the tests were finished, we had pizza parties and played knock out and hung out for hours. As a middle school boy-crazed girl, I remember chatting with the girls about the boys there and making lists of who we were crushing on. This was the first time Will and I were in the same place, but I don’t think it would constitute as a cute meet because he was not on that list.
Even though Will was nowhere on my list of crushes that day at testing, we did start to spend quite a bit of time together, but it wasn’t exactly by choice. Will is a year and a half younger than me, and right around the same age as my little brother (who is not so little anymore). The two of them were fast friends, which meant that Will was at my house all the time. He was always inviting me to hang out with them, but my response was always, “Who else is going?” I wouldn’t consider going unless there was someone else on the list that was of more interest to me. (Sorry pal!) As the years of high school passed, Will spent many days and nights with my family. Most of the time he drove me crazy, and I didn’t want much to do with him. For many years he was just my brother’s annoying friend, and I never thought our lives would end up where they are today…
P.S. This photo was the first we ever took of the two of us, and I only took it because Willie complained that he was the only person not in my facebook album… whoops!
xoxo,
Katelyn Workman
