“Every love story begins with a moment…                  Ours began with a feeling.”

💖 How We Met 

We first met through a mutual acquaintance in March 2025 in Glenwood, Minnesota. From the very beginning, being around Bill felt strangely familiar — as if we had known each other our entire lives. I felt an instant sense of comfort and trust that I had never experienced.

We bonded quickly over our identical sense of humor and childlike personalities. It wasn't long before we became best friends. The kind of best friends who could laugh for hours. A friendship where the most memorable and enjoyable adventures were made out of getting lost two hours from home in the middle of the night, running out of gas on the side of the road, and being stuck in a cold broke down truck on a lakeside road. No matter where we ended up or how stressful the situation may have been, we still managed to make light of the situation, wishing it wouldn't end, simply because we enjoyed our time together.

Bill just so happened to enter my life during a very difficult chapter — a time when I was ending an emotionally and physically abusive marriage. A time where I feared that rebuilding my sense of safety and self-worth was no longer an option. As our beautiful friendship grew, Bill never once asked for anything from me. Instead, he became a steady source of comfort, peace, and protection. He was there every day, making sure I felt safe, especially during moments where I truly wasn’t.

As I took the steps to leave my old life behind — moving, rebuilding, finding myself again — he stood beside me. He helped me pack, helped me move, slept nearby on my couch on nights when I was too scared to be alone, and reminded me continuously that I deserved a life of kindness, security, and self-worth. His presence slowly helped restore a part of me that I thought I had lost forever.

Bill once told me that he hoped to one day find a woman just like me to build a life with. I didn’t yet know how deeply he meant it — or how deeply I would grow to feel something in return — but his words stayed with me. Even when he attempted to make a step toward something more than friendship, he never reacted with anger or disappointment when I wasn’t ready. He simply accepted my boundaries, respected my healing, and continued being the same loyal, steady, selfless friend he had always been. And that meant more than he ever realized at the time.

I will forever be grateful to him for all that he has done for me.

The Moment Everything Changed 

I knew without question that Bill had feelings for me — feelings that reached beyond friendship. But I didn’t know just how deeply he cared. I kept my guard up. I couldn’t risk having my heart broken again, and more than anything, I couldn’t bear the thought of losing the beautiful friendship we had built.

Then, unexpectedly, Bill left town for a while — and his absence hit me harder than I ever imagined it could. Within a single day of him being gone, everything felt different. The empty chair next to my couch, the absent sound of his voice and his laughter, the silence where his teasing remarks normally lived — it all felt wrong. It felt like losing something irreplaceable.

That’s when it finally became clear:
I wasn’t just missing my best friend.
I was missing the man I had been so blindly falling deeply in love with. For the first time, I allowed myself to acknowledge it — the feelings I had been too scared to accept, too scared to risk, too scared to believe were real.

I reached out to him in a panic, apologizing for the times I may have hurt him without realizing it and for not seeing the truth sooner. In that moment, I finally let my guard down. I told him I loved him and gave him my heart—something that terrified me, yet felt undeniably right.

He didn’t respond right away, and that night I was terrified that I had lost him—that I had let my one real chance at love slip through my fingers. But the next morning, his message finally came.
He loved me too.

He called soon after, and I could hear the joy in his voice — the kind that makes everything settle into place with absolute certainty. Even though he was gone for twenty days, we never stopped talking, never stopped connecting, and never stopped building something that felt more and more like home.

When he finally came home and we held each other for the first time, it was as if every fear, every doubt, and every old heartbreak simply dissolved. In his arms, I felt safe. I felt loved. I felt complete.

I felt like I was exactly where I was meant to be.

❤️ Our Lives Now ❤️

As the days pass our love only grows deeper. We are still best friends before anything else. We laugh constantly. We support each other without hesitation. We face challenges the way we always have — together.

We aren’t perfect, but our love is real, loyal, patient, and strong. We communicate, we learn, we grow, and we always come back to the simple truth:

We would do anything for each other.

Our relationship began in a storm, but it has become the calmest, most beautiful place we’ve ever known. And on June 13, 2026 — exactly one year after we began our journey — we will stand together and commit our hearts, our lives, and our future to each other.

Forever best friends.
Forever partners.
Forever home.

- Written with love by the future Mrs.Paulson 

💍 The Proposal