How we got here

Our Story

Three years, six chapters, and no attempt to make any of it sound like destiny. It is just what happened, in order.

  1. June2024

    Ashley and Sean on adjacent bar stools in a dim, neon-lit tavern, turned in toward each other, a wall of framed photographs behind the bar.

    The night nobody photographed

    A bar on Willy Street, a first date that ran four hours past the polite exit. There is no picture of it because neither of us thought to take one, which in hindsight is the most promising thing about it.

  2. Winter2024

    Ashley and Sean in ski helmets and black jackets, arms around each other on a snowy deck at the base of a ski hill, snow falling over the runs behind them.

    All in, immediately

    Ashley does not do things by halves. Within six months there were skis, a season pass, and a plan involving a mountain in Japan neither of us had been to. Sean, who is not a person who books flights quickly, booked the flights.

  3. Spring2025

    Sean and Ashley cheek to cheek in a knit-hat selfie, the pointed peak of Kirkjufell and a waterfall behind them under a broken Icelandic sky.

    Team Smash

    Iceland proved the thing we already suspected: we travel well together. Nine days, one car, a great deal of wind, and not a single argument worth remembering. The name stuck somewhere around Kirkjufell.

  4. Summer2025

    A framed watercolor of the house: green clapboard, a yellow gable, white window trim, and a wooden front door at the top of a short flight of steps.

    A place

    Ashley painted the address on a board and hung it by the door, and the house stopped being an address and became a home. That is the whole of her, in one small painted object.

  5. August2026

    Sean kissing Ashley on the cheek on a rooftop above the Milwaukee skyline, her eyes shut and grinning, rooftops and water towers stretching out behind them.

    The Capitol steps

    Sean built her a scroll story on her phone and asked her to read it standing on the Capitol steps at dusk. The last line said "Look down." She looked up first. She said yes anyway.

  6. August2027

    And then this

    Which brings us here, and to the part where you come to Wisconsin in the heat and watch us do it properly.

What happens next

The rest of it

The story stops here and the logistics start. One of them needs an answer from you.

Madison, WI

The day, hour by hourRSVP