Yea

On Saturday (7/13), I officiated Samantha and Cooper’s wedding ceremony at Hotel Za Za in Dallas, Texas. Here are the remarks I shared with them and their guests:

The genesis of Samantha and Cooper’s relationship was uneventful. Samantha says: “We met on my first day of training for a restaurant called Liberty Burger… Then he came to manage the Liberty Burger I was working at in Lakewood… We didn’t really pay a lot of attention to each other. I worked the morning shift and he worked the night shift so we only saw each shift, for a couple of minutes before I would leave. He eventually became curious about me when he saw me in a picture with one of his friends on Facebook. This inspired him to strike up a conversation to find out how I knew his friend. After that we talked more regularly at work, but even then, we didn’t really feel a draw to each other.”

Then adventure struck. Cooper says: “We discovered that I had a wedding to attend in Austin the same weekend she had her sister’s birthday party. So, in lieu of her usual pattern of taking the bus down she asked to ride with me. I thought why not, she does not have murder me energy. 

This was a definite turning point. Samantha says: “That’s when things started to change, very subtly, but noticeably… Cooper and I started hanging out regularly. As we hung out more and more we organically became more attracted to each other and got to know each other more. It wasn’t an earth-shattering can’t stay away from each other experience; it just softly happened. We never had a conversation about where we were going as a couple; we never really had to. It was just a feeling we kept following, and the progression felt natural.”

The adventure struck again. Samantha and Cooper had an experience few have when developing their relationship. Samantha went abroad to teach. They had one year of long distance. Then Cooper joined her for another two years of teaching in two different countries, no less. The organic sense of relationship building Samantha mentions coupled with a multi-year adventure cemented their relationship.

This is why on a more recent adventure to Silverthorn, Colorado, when Cooper dropped on one knee and asked Samantha to marry him, she responded with two words, only one of which I can mention, which was yea. 

This is why when asked why they want to get married now, Cooper says: “I don’t know, it feels right. I approach life logically most of the time and this time I just decided to let that view out the window. I feel this one. I don’t have a reason, and I think that is the reason. I don’t want to go around this world with anyone but her.”