I met Andrea on April 19th, 2008.  It was a bit of luck and matching coincidence.  She had just moved to the Bay Area, a few months after me, and a mutual friend (Andrea Gardner), was visiting me and suggested we meet (as friends).  In the months that followed we slowly developed a friendship.  By October of 2008, we celebrated our first Thanksgiving with a few friends (including Eric Holkeboer) in San Francisco.  I cooked most of the food but she baked a mean apple pie.  She refused to date me.  If you were to ask her, she’d say she put me aside because she knew I might be trouble – or something like that.

It would take me nearly two years before I would convince her to date me.  Andrea says that I finally “crept in.”  That talk happened as we walked, coffee in hand, along the Panhandle, a small rectangular park that extends from the eastern border of Golden Gate Park.  On our first date, September 4th, 2009, we went to a cuban restaurant on Haight street called Cha Cha Cha.  An extra large pitcher of sangria (oddly neither of us can recall who ordered the large size) helped calm our nerves.  The date may have ended with a romantic kiss but due to the PG nature of this wedding blog, I’m not saying whether it did.  In either case, we both knew this was something very special.

A few weeks after we started dating, coincidence would strike again.  I had planned and paid for a trip to Puerto Vallarta with best friends Eric Holkeboer and Phil Gort (now groomsmen), and Andrea had a few days off from work, so after a month of dating, we had our first international trip and she joined us in Mexico.  This trip would be the first time that Andrea’s immune system proved abnormally strong, as all the boys got sick (don’t eat poorly cooked mexican steak – who knew?).  A month later we flew to Michigan to meet each other’s families over Halloween and a month after that, Andrea joined Tim and his family in Phoenix for a vacation.  This would be the second time that Andrea’s immune system beat out all.  Loving a nurse has its benefits.

We kind of broke the rules a little bit.  In February, we started talking about moving in together.  I asked her on a Friday night, sitting at dinner at our favorite restaurant in The City, El Toreador.  We didn’t really make up our minds but the very next morning decided to check out one apartment.  After the tour, we took about fifteen steps away, stopped, looked at each other, and decided this was what we wanted.  We signed the lease that day.  That’s what thing that I’ve come to really enjoy with Andrea – the hard decisions seem to always be the easiest.   Just don’t ask us to agree on the appropriate coasters for a coffee table.

Our strangely similar backgrounds, friends, and career paths led us to one another, but a deeply connected friendship-turned-romance brought us to this concrete conclusion: we were meant for each other.

Written by Tim