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 2:
Honestly I can’t put my finger on when it happened. But sometime around the time I left for college, we started becoming real friends. Whenever I was home for the holidays, we went caving with a group of friends, and had movie nights, and spent a lot of time texting about relationship problems. Not ours, of course. But somehow Will became the person I confided in. I would get so frustrated with him, because any time I talked to him about my new love interest, he always shot them down. None of them seemed to get his approval. After two years at school in South Carolina, I transferred to a school back home. We started spending more and more time together and became best friends. Then the set-up happened.
We were such good friends, and we just wanted each other to be happy. So, one day, while we were celebrating my dad’s birthday over dinner, we chatted about setting each other up. We went through our list of single friends and discussed possibilities. I had the perfect friend in mind! So, I did my matchmaking and the two of them started dating. I remember telling my friend about my best friend Willie who was such a great guy and who I trusted and who I knew she would love. While they were dating, Will’s set up for me didn’t happen. So I had a thing for a guy that just wasn’t a good choice and left me with a lot of heartache. So much heartache, that of course, I confided in Will. We even spent Valentine’s day together (Will + pitiful me + his setup eating ice cream and watching a romance movie) that year as I cried over these failed relationships! Soon after, the relationship I had set him up on failed and we were both single again. So of course we realized our love for each other and got married!! Just kidding…
We continued to spend a lot of time together. We had a college retreat at Pipestem Resort, and we rode together. (to save gas of course.) Before the retreat, Willie asked if I’d eaten or if he could eat at my house. So before we rode together, I cooked dinner for him at my parents’ house. By this time, we were pretty much inseparable and did everything together at the retreat. So much so that a new friend there asked if we were dating. Willie looked repulsed at the idea and immediately said, “Gross, no way!” which hurt my feelings more than I cared to admit. Little did I know that he was just overcompensating to cover up the fact that he had been crushing on me over the years. Even though he responded in such a terrible way, I think that comment sparked some thoughts in both of our minds as we began to consider what that would actually be like.
The Retreat where I was “gross”
Worship partners + Caving buds
xoxo,
Katelyn Workman
