They initially matched online in 2017 and, shortly after that, he saw her one day while he was riding his moped and she was walking to work and he messaged her to meet. They decided on a central location and met at the Iowa Memorial Union. “I felt nervous,” he said. “But the nerves quickly faded. It was very easy to talk and laugh with her.”

“I knew right away that there was chemistry. He was gorgeous and funny and I felt right at ease with him,” Emily recalled. It was pretty early on in their relationship that she knew Elijah was the one. “I don’t know an exact moment, other than this general feeling that I was in the right place with the right person,” she said, “I always felt at home with Elijah.”

Their proposal story makes me laugh so much and I’m just delighted to share it with you. “It was a Friday and I picked Elijah up from work at the VA. We had Sophie (our puppy) in the car because, after work, we would always take her on a walk.

“Typically, we would go straight from parking the car at home to the walk, but Elijah kept insisting that he needed to go to the bathroom so he had to go up to the apartment first. Me, being oblivious as always, was like, “Okay you need to pee. I get it. No big deal.” We ran up to the apartment and then went for our walk.

“It was a rainy afternoon and a bit chilly, but not too bad for December. Elijah kept telling me that he wanted to walk the ‘long’ way and I was annoyed that it was raining and I wanted to get the walk over and done with. I kept pushing back like, no, I don’t want to walk the long way, let’s just keep going.

“Finally, he convinced me to walk part of the long way (by saying he would pick dinner for the night, which swayed me pretty easily). For context, the long way was through part of a neighborhood, but it also had this really pretty path with lots of trees and a little bridge and every single time we walked through it, I would comment about how pretty it was. We walked a little into the path and I was looking down at Sophie, who was sniffing a sign pole and thought to myself, ‘Come on, let’s keep moving.’

“I looked up at Elijah and he was holding a square box. Not a ring box, but a square bracelet box; you know, the bigger one. I immediately froze. I said to him, ‘You need to tell me if that’s a ring. Because if it’s not, I’m not going to cry.’ He responded, ‘Yes, it’s a ring, this is just the box they gave me.’

“I’m pretty sure I started crying, now not worrying about the rain or Sophie sniffing around every single piece of grass. Elijah then said, “I didn’t have time to get the ring sized. So we can do this now or we can wait until it fits”.

“In a gremlin voice, I said, ‘Give it to me now.’ Elijah got down on one knee and pulled out the most gorgeous, perfect ring that I have ever seen. I obviously said yes and then cried on and off the whole way home. He said to me, ‘”‘We can finish up the walk now, but I wanted to do it on this path since you love the area so much.’ I profusely apologized for being a brat the whole time and not just going with the flow. It was unexpected in the way that I knew it was coming eventually, but I wasn’t sure when. It was perfect!”

They brought Sophie along for photos and she was such a little gem. Just look at that face.

Despite the fact that it was Memorial Day weekend and the park was busy, we found a lot of private spots that gave perfect scenic landscape views.