Matt and I had gone ring shopping and picked out the perfect ring (I know it was the perfect ring because we spent hours looking and eventually found a ring that had a ruby in it and had to be changed out and no other ring but the perfect ring would be worth that hassle). We consider our first date to be October 3rd, 2003. We met up in Salt Lake on the Friday before General Conference, saw a movie in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building (during which we held hands for the first time) and walked around temple square. General Conference was coming up again and I assumed that Matt would propose then, March 31st…until we discovered that his mission reunion was that night.

On the Tuesday before conference, I started thinking that Matt would propose Saturday on Temple Square, so I informed him that if he proposed on April Fool’s Day, I would say no. “What if,” he asked, “I had the ring in my pocket right now?” He really did have a rectangular bulge in his pocket and so I started to get panicky. It turned out to be his cell phone.

The next evening, when Matt was about to go home, he started talking in Russian and got down on one knee. I started hyperventilating and he got down on the other knee. He claims he was speaking English the whole time and just wanted to pray.

On Thursday, I had an interview for an internship and Matt said he would meet me there and then we would go have lunch. He asked if I wanted to go for a walk and, as my apartment was generally crowded and we had very little alone time, I agreed. We began to walk in the direction of the park where we had had our first kiss. Oh my goodness, I thought, this is it. About halfway to the park, Matt pulls me across the street to this giant mud pit and starts talking about how he had seen them working in it a few days before. I, being the impatient soul that I am, began tugging at him to leave; yet, he persisted in musing about what they might plant here. “What kind of trees do you think they will plant?” he asked. “I don’t know…” I said, “orange trees?” “It takes a lot of hard work to make an orchard, but just think what it will look like in five years…or ten years…or twenty.” Then, he got down on one knee, pulled a ring box out of his pocket, and asked me to marry him. I said yes…I think. I guess it would make sense that he would want to show off his fiancee at his mission reunion…