We’re a couple of student affairs educators living in the DC Metro area who decided to get married after dating for three years. We met through a mutual friend, Ashley, while we were in graduate school and Laura would visit Raleigh, NC to see Ashley and after a few visits we realized that there was some chemistry. We hung out together while celebrating Ashley’s birthday one year and Aaron asked Laura out a few weeks later.
Laura was working a summer program with demanding hours and Aaron was waiting to move to his new job in the DC area, but Laura was able to find some time to go out to sushi at Mt. Fuji in Durham, NC and from there we found as much time as possible to see each other before Aaron moved away from the triangle area. We kept in touch and spoke almost every day and sent each other a lot of text messages (Aaron had to upgrade his texting plan to unlimited since it was during the dark ages before iMessage).
We found ways to visit each other during the busy first few months of our new jobs. We met in the middle between Northern Virginia and Newark, DE in White Marsh every few weeks (except for one time when we made plans and had to cancel because of the freak earthquake of August 2011). During this time Aaron became very familiar with the NE corridor Amtrak schedule as he frequently visited Laura in Newark.
After a couple years of frequent weekend visits, Laura moved to the DC area to accept a new job so we got to see each other all the time and then we decided to get married.