Our Love Story, Part Three

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You can read Part One here & Part Two here.

I could write so many posts on our relationship and our many visits to see each other, but I’m sure these posts are getting boring, so I will try to wrap this up in one final post!

After our first weekend together, Jacob and I both knew that we had an undeniable bond. During one of our late night phone calls, we started planning our next visit and since Jacob was out of vacation days (he spent all of his at the dunes), it was decided that I would fly out there again.  Luckily for us, I was at a good-paying job with commission bonuses so money wasn’t an issue; unluckily for me, that employer was the worst and would slowly suck the life out of me.  With that being said, I honestly don’t know how we could have made the relationship work if it weren’t for that job, so I do thank God for sending me down that path. We decided that it would work best for me to go visit him over Memorial Day weekend—he wanted to take me to Lake Havasu with some of his friends.

Lake Havasu

At that point, we still hadn’t used the terms “girlfriend/boyfriend” or really talked about being exclusive—we were still trying to sort out the whole long-distance thing, so the last thing we needed to worry about was labels.

Remember those butterflies that I talked about in the last post? Well, they made another appearance on my flight to Phoenix (and every trip after that). I will never forget the anxious/excited feeling that I felt every time I went to visit and every time he would come visit Oklahoma.

Shortly after that Memorial Day weekend at Lake Havasu, I finally asked Jacob if I was his girlfriend. His response was “You have been for awhile.” Well goodness, how’s a girl to know if you don’t say it? Haha. We never could pinpoint exactly when we became official, but since 29 is a significant number to us (both of our birthdays fall on the 29^th of our birth months), we decided we would claim May 29th, 2012 as the day we made it official.

Over the next year, we made more trips back and forth than I can even count. You always hear about trust issues and fights that long-distance couples have but that was never the case with us. There was one point where we started to wonder if we could make it work, but with lots of self-reflection, communication, and prayer, we made it through that tough stage. We did quickly discover that the conversation about who would move where caused a lot of tension, so we just refused to talk about it; call it denial, call it naïve, call it whatever you want but I had faith that if we were meant to be then that issue would work itself out and I was right.

In early 2013, Jacob randomly made a comment about selling his house and moving to Oklahoma. I just shrugged the comment off because that was always such a touchy subject for us. Little did I know, he was serious—within a few months, he had sold his house, moved in with one of his friends, sold his quad and toy hauler, and started looking for jobs in Oklahoma. By August, he was packing a U-Haul trailer and heading to Oklahoma! I was still in shock and very overwhelmed—I struggled with the idea that he would give up everything he knew and move across the country, I felt guilty that I didn’t have to give up anything, and I felt so much love for the man who was willing to that for me—for us.

On December 31^st, 2013, Jacob asked me to be his wife! He was so nervous that he could barely get the words out but it was absolutely perfect and I wouldn't change a thing about that night. 

When we were discussing my ring later that night, he said he was so afraid I would find it at his apartment (I’m notorious for ruining surprises) so he had it hidden in his coat pocket in the closet for the past FOUR MONTHS—he bought the ring before he even left Arizona! When I asked him why he bought it so early instead of waiting to make sure he wanted to be in Oklahoma and with me, he said “Do you think I would have moved to Oklahoma if I didn’t know I was going to spend forever with you?”