They met at a mutual friend’s house during an Iowa v. Iowa State football game. “Jace swears I ignored him, but he was really just too nervous to talk to me,” said Amy. Their first official date was a few months later to a hockey game where Jace “thought I had made her angry or offended her, but it turns out, it was just bad hockey.”

Both of them knew very early in their relationship that this would be their forever. Jace described the first time they had really talked. “I had been trying to figure out a way to talk to her since the CyHawk game in the fall and this was the first chance. I had added her as a friend on Facebook and she had posted that she had bought a house so I asked her that night how owning a house was, and we talked for most of the evening about various things. I eventually wound up playing the game Codenames and she sat on the couch behind me. I leaned back to think about my clue and we made eye contact. That moment lives in my head.”

“I knew he was the one,” Amy said, “When he surprised me for Valentine’s Day on one of our very first dates. He came to my house with a bottle of wine, two red roses, and an origami paper crane. Previously at trivia night at Donnelly’s, when I was bored between rounds, I turned our extra sheet into an origami crane and Jace was so impressed that he spent all of Valentine’s Day learning how to make one to surprise me that evening. His paper crane is still on display at our place and I knew all his thoughtfulness and attention to detail portrayed qualities of someone I wanted to spend my life with.

“It also helps that no matter what we were doing or who we were surrounded by, it felt like we were the only two people in the room. We were so darn to each other that we tuned out anything going on around us so that we could get to know each other better.”

They had planned for a winter engagement session, in part because university students would be on break, but also, they are both pursuing PhDs and that is keeping them very busy so the timing worked out well to do their engagement session right before they left on a road trip to see his family for the holidays.

I knew we would get along fabulously, but even my expectations were blown away. We had so much fun in the cold downtown campus area! Amy & Jace’s love is so sweet and tender and they clearly have so much love and respect for each other as well as loads of fun!

We stopped to take some photos outside Donnelly’s Pub as that was where they had their first unofficial date with some friends for trivia night. It has since become a location that is special to them so we had to include it in some of their photos!