Chelsey Pater was kind enough to share with us the story of her engagement.
I guess in detail our story goes like this....
It reminds me of classic war movies where romance is always tied in. I always found those movies to be the most romantic and I've dreamt of marrying a military man since I was a young girl. Finally, I found my military man.
We met formally on Labor Day weekend at an infamous annual party with friends that both of us had known mutually for years. The previous night, we sat at the same table and had some light flirty conversation at Dutch's Larder, a bar in Oakley. It was by coincidence that we ran into each other two nights in a row. I haven't stopped thinking about him since that weekend.
We talked on the phone almost every day for months while he was in Pensacola, FL, then Camp Lejuene, NC, then Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, and back to Camp Lejuene.
In the fall, he came to visit and met the first love of my life, my two-year-old son. He is now "our" boy. It was like they knew each other already and at that moment I knew we would get married one day.
We continued our entire relationship long distance, seeing each other only once a month, but each time it was worth the wait to see one another. We met up for a short trip in Gatlinburg exactly one year after first meeting each other. He asked me to marry him in the middle of the Smoky Mountains. It was the most romantic weekend of my life!
He discovered his deployment would be the beginning of 2015. As I write this (February 5, 2015), it's the day after his departure over seas. He will be gone until August, when he will be home to search for our house in Cincinnati and plan our dream wedding on July 2 or 3 of 2016!
An Independence Day wedding will represent how extremely proud I am of my sweet fiancé, defending our country with the United States Marine Corps so that we at home can rest peacefully.
Pride has a new meaning to me now, and I couldn't be happier to have found my soldier.