our story

Even as a writer, this is one of those stories I just don't know to capture with words. It's a beautiful story of God's that He's written over the last 15 years of our lives. And it's probably why I haven't tried to write it on the blog, or anywhere. 

Mr. Charming and I first met years and years ago. I was almost 16, and he was 18, and we met on AOL. My friends and I use to hang out in good ol' Phoenix chat, before the days of Tinder, Facebook and all the other social media sites, we'd chat using our fun colorful fonts and talking to kids from school and dance. One evening my girlfriends and I started chatting with some people who hung out at an arcade and pool hall where we'd been and we decided to all go play some pool. As you can guess, Mr. Charming was one of the boys at the pool hall. Still a pool shark, he had mad skills and was crazy cute, and became an insta-crush. 

I so wish I had photos from back then, but as we only had pagers and no digital cameras, there was no documentation of our early days hanging out, but I can remember it like it was yesterday. We both were dating other people at the time, so we never got together, but we did flirt and it was talked about from time to time. We hung out for months, making lots of memories we could later reflect back on. Late nights getting Italian food. Spending hours playing pool, and cruising down Mill Ave. the local college town street where it was "cool" to show off your car, (there wasn't much else to do here). I started music right around the time we were hanging out, so he knew about my website and I had sung to him a couple of times. Due to our other relationships, teen life and me starting to perform and move into my career more, we fell out of touch. 

For nine years. 

In those years, we grew up, we had relationships, and school, and careers. Little did I know, our story didn't leave off in a pool hall in Arizona. 

Reunited... & it feels so good....

In 2006 I was offered a contract to tour the Caribbean as a headlining singer for six months. It was a huge blessing because I had come out of a bad relationship, lost my apartment and just wanted to escape. Touring some of the most beautiful parts of the world, was wonderful, although lonely and I couldn't believe my eyes when, 5 months into my contract, from an internet cafe in Aruba, I would check my email and get a message from him. 

He had found me by my website, (so if there's any reason to have a website with your name on it, this would be my biggest argument for it.) haha, Just touching base we talked back and forth a bit and decided to have dinner when my contract ended and I came back to Arizona to visit my mom (at eighteen I moved to California to work in entertainment and had been living there since.) 

When we met up for dinner, it was like nothing had changed. I was more comfortable with him than with anyone I'd ever been with. By our third date, I knew I was in trouble. He was everything all my friends told me I was crazy to wait for. And I was supposed to leave for another 6 month tour just two weeks after our first date. 

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While I was excited to see new countries, and experience new things with my music, I was heartbroken. I was reunited with a man who I was falling for and a part of me didn't want to leave. But I did. And we decided to keep in touch and planned to meet in Manhattan six months later and see where we were at.

But cue me being oversees, in South America and listening to Michael Buble's "Home" on repeat, living on chocolate and crying in my hotel rooms. Yeah, I know, sad. But I realized i was no longer where I wanted to be.

He was where I wanted to be. He had started to become "Home". It turns out a month into my contract, my new manager for the second tour was a not-s0-great person and the working conditions overseas were making me dislike music and what I was doing, so I left the tour, paid almost  a months salary on a flight home from where I was and surprised him, at his door, 5 months early. Lucky for me he was pleasantly surprised, because, let's be honest, a move like that could have gone either way, and he's been my Mr. Charming ever since. 

What our story has taught me, and what I wanted it to teach the cynics who laughed at me for waiting for my person, is that, love is real. God can bring you together with the one who will support you, love you, laugh with you. And that living out my wild & crazy dreams and taking my adventures around the world, are much better with my best friend by my side. 

To read our engagement story, click here. 

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