Sometime over a decade ago, Monica and Chris sat in a church on a Sunday night as they were re-taught the basics of the Catholic faith as part of a Confirmation program in their hometown. Sitting in adjacent pews, they occasionally shared an awkward, probably angsty joke as teenagers do. It wasn't until a weekend-long retreat in upstate New York, however, when the two actually connected. Isolated in a retreat center where the clocks had been ripped from the walls, everyone was woken by banging gongs at dawn, and cell phones were treated as contraband, Monica and Chris realized they shared similar thoughts on many aspects of life. Standing atop that hill in Warwick, the pair looked out longingly at a distant road, imagining that, like the drivers on that road, someday they too would be free. Seeing as that was about an hour into the retreat, it's easy to imagine the overly dramatic reactions they shared the rest of that weekend as large groups of significantly-more-enthusiastic teenagers squared danced to Mumford & Sons' "I Will Wait" and the retreat leaders sang hymns through mega phones. Against all odds, the two survived. They've been looking out from hilltops together ever since, admiring the world while always planning their next adventure. Countless road trips later, "I Will Wait" still remains notably absent from every playlist they've ever played in the car together.

When medical school brought Chris to the other side of the country, the two initially dreaded another four years of long distance between them. As it turns out, COVID-19 had other plans anyway. "Stuck" in Philly together for much of the early pandemic, Monica and Chris quickly realized how fortunate they were to have each other and how happy their life could be together. "I better lock this down," Chris thought as he prepared to start clerkships in June. As the two camped, hiked, and gradually became covered in more dirt during their trip to Kings Canyon National Park, Chris obsessively checked his backpack to make sure he still had his "shirt." By the end of their hike to Mist Falls, Monica was confident that her boyfriend either had a ring in that bag or had developed rapid-onset OCD at age 24. Thankfully it was the former, and beneath a waterfall deep in the woods of Central California, Chris popped the question. To this day, the name of the heavily tattooed shirtless man with shoulder-length hair that caught the moment on camera remains unknown.