And We're Sticking to It!
Our Story
How we Met
Matching up on Match
Matching up on Match
Starbucks brought us together; love keeps us together. But it was a close call. Read on!
We were both on Match.com, looking for romance and a potential life partner. Kate was new to Match. She was learning how to be single after nearly 30 years of marriage and now a widow. She’d just moved to the D.C. area from San Diego.
In turn, Jim was a lifetime Washingtonian. He decided he was embedded on Match for way too long. Resigned to a slog, Jim was thinking about taking a long break. Yet he took a last look …
Jim liked that Kate read voraciously about history and was an accomplished dressage show rider. Kate liked that Jim’s messages to her were thoughtfully written, and exuded warmth, playfulness and an adventurous spirit.
We swapped pithy little Match texts for a week, then arranged to meet at Starbucks along the Potomac River in Old Town, Alexandria. That was April 13, 2021.
Being late is a deal-breaker for Kate. Yet the streets were packed with parked cars when Jim arrived in Old Town. He was still many blocks away, with no parking space in sight.
Jim finally wedged his car into a small opening, and dashed block after block to Starbucks, seemingly a far galaxy away, his loose topsiders flopping like fresh-caught trout.
Kate was just minutes from packing up and going home. Jim made it barely in time. They talked for 1 1/2 hours about everything and nothing.
Now they’re both going home … together, forever.
Last dash to Starbucks
The marriage ask
We'll Always
Have Paris
We'll Always
Have Paris
Ah, Paris. The city of light and love. It was a toasty summer eve 2023 after 18 months of ardent courtship. Jim took Kate to dinner at a historic Art Nouveau restaurant on the Left Bank. Terrific wine flowed.
Afterward they ambled onto a quiet bridge over the Seine, the Pont des Arts. Notre Dame gleamed behind them. Jim held Kate close.
“Je ne jeux pas imagine ma vie sans toi,” Jim said, pressing into her hand a sapphire family heirloom ring.
Jim shared more words of passion, en francais. The moment seemed so right. Until suddenly …
“Quiggle, what are you saying? Speak English!”
“I froze and forgot all my French,” Kate recalls today. “I didn’t understand a word Jim said. Was the sapphire ring a friendship ring or what?”
“I thought I’d blown it,” Jim says.
He still plowed on that night, now getting down on his knees. “Je t’aime, oui je t’aime. Veux tu m’epouser?”
On his knees? Flash awareness here. Kate now realized all.
“Of course!” she replied.
Champagne, chocolates and a dozen red roses waited at their hotel room.