As a 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, to even writing a romance-themed novella in a college creative writing class… there is 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)
Right in the middle of our Big Lots trip and our first date was Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving at my house was a hoot this year! My sweet Brazilian friend Rayza spent the day with my family, so we had a houseful. While we had this houseful of people over, Mom and Dad’s septic broke and so we couldn’t use the toilets!! So we moved our party over to my grandmother’s house in town to play games. I couldn’t wait until our date to see Willie, and he had spent many holidays with my family so it wasn’t unusual for him to stop by. He came by Gram’s house to play games. We sat beside each other and I was so nervous! I remember my face turning red as our feet touched under the table. Then when he left I hugged him goodbye and my family started to see the way we were looking at each other and knew something was changing.
The Big Lots trip was on a Monday during Thanksgiving break. Our first date was on Friday. Oh how that week dragged on… I was so nervous! We had spent so many hours together. Willie had spent the night at my house with my brother and seen me at my worst, he’d seen me covered in mud in a cave, he’d heard about all of my relationship failures… he knew me so well. So why was I nervous? I was so nervous that I couldn’t even eat that day! We had planned to see a movie, but a few hours before, we were texting back and forth and Will mentioned that since we were both just sitting around, we should go grab dinner before; I said no because I was too nervous!
So we met at the movies and saw “Interstellar” and I’ll be honest, I have no idea what it was about… It was one of those movies that you have to really focus to follow the plot and I was so concerned about the fact that Willie, my brother’s best friend that I’d known since middle school… was holding my hand! As the movie went on I went from anxious to shocked that this was really happening. It was so unexpected, but strangely felt comfortable.
After the movie, Willie had to work security at his college. This consisted of sitting in the office and occasionally making a few rounds and locking things up, so he asked me to come hang out. By this point my nervousness had worn off and I was starving, so I agreed and we picked up a pizza that we ate straight out the box. Classy, I know. We started watching a movie, but ended up turning it off and talking for hours. I mentioned before in my post 2017 (find it HERE!) about that night and how we chatted about all kinds of things. We had been such good friends and knew so much about each other, but it had never been relevant to talk about things like marriage views and family dreams. As we had these conversations we realized we had similar views on the important things. As crazy as it sounds, I knew that night that something big was happening.
After that first date, everything sort of just fell into place.
xoxo,
Katelyn Workman
Want to read the rest of this series? Find it here!
