The moment she saw him, she started asking around about him. “I had joined roller derby the summer before and it was the first game that two of the people I started with were playing in. I was setting up the merch booth and this guy walked in wearing black jeans, a black tee, and a cowboy hat.” Rebecca immediately asked everyone who he was. “They told me he was Cowboy and he was a pretty quiet, mysterious guy. Later during the game, one of my teeny, tiny friends took a hit and went flying across the floor right toward him. He had to jump over them to avoid colliding! It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.” She doesn’t remember formally meeting him, but after that, “he was just always around and he was the cute ref who was out of my league that I made excuses to talk to.”

They had known each other for years before they decided to try a relationship. They never really had a first date, but more of a first weekend. “We had already discussed and talked through so much stuff,” Josh said. “We had dinner, went to Joe’s [a bar], and wound up walking back to the car like we were in a romcom and we were the only people in the world.”

“To quote Roy Kent,” Rebecca added, “I felt like I’d been hit by f*cking lightning.”

Rebecca might have known he was the one before they even started dating, but she said she definitely knew after that first weekend. “I remember we had gone boot shopping because Josh needed some new ones for work, and when we were leaving I mentioned I wanted to go to TJMaxx. He told me he’d go anywhere I wanted to go. Then after TJ Maxx I wanted to go to Michaels. He told me he’d go anywhere I wanted to go. Then I told him I wanted to go to Homegoods, and he told me he’d go anywhere I wanted to go. That was the first time I had ever been with anyone who just wanted to be with me no matter what we were doing, and I realized I felt the same way about him.”

On the same night a few months later, unknown to each other at the time, they told their friend they were going to marry the other. “I realized I was going to marry her one night after a derby game,” Josh recalled. “We were at the after party and I was talking to one of our close friends and told them I was going to marry her. Turns out, that same night Rebecca told the same friend the same thing.”

Because roller derby was the actual reason they met, Josh decided to propose at a roller derby game. “So the big thing with the proposal was that I had planned every single detail. We got engaged at halftime of a home roller derby game. One of our very close friends helped me plan everything right down to the photographer and how I would get Rebecca out to the middle of the floor. It took extreme amounts of planning to pull off all the tiny details.”

This next January, two years after that first weekend together, they will get married and I feel so much joy that I get to photograph their day! Their engagement session was a blast! Not only could we have just chatted the entire time, but they were so at ease with each other that every moment in front of the camera was genuinely beautiful and unscripted. Their favorite thing is to be around each other and it’s so evident in their interactions. We also, of course, got roller skates involved for part of it!