Tucked inside this ballroom wedding is a day filled with gold and glamour. (Two of our favorite things) There are sparkles, there are elegant, modern details and a neutral color palette that shines so, so bright. Just add in a ridiculously beautiful couple and a team of vendors including Exquisite Events by Amanee, Blossoms, and Megan Noll Photography, and the result is pure ballroom magic.
From the bride… Matt and I met on Tinder and went on our first date a week after we started chatting online. We met at Righteous Room for drinks and ended up having a 6 hour conversation over Jameson (his favorite liquor) and cosmopolitans (at the time my favorite cocktail). We celebrate our anniversary from our first date that night (February 5, 2014); mainly because the lines are a little blurred as to when we were “official” (when you fall in love who’s tracking ;-)). Matt and I love movie nights, cooking dinner for each other, going out for date nights in the city, and traveling! Because he lived in Italy for a year, that “forced” us to take several international trips between 2015-2016 while our relationship was long distance and discovered that seeing the world together was one of our favorite things to do. Together, he and I have been to Rome, Milan, Florence, Cinque Terre, Venice, Paris, Nice, Budapest, Barcelona, Lisbon, Sintra, and in the US San Fran, Napa, Miami, Chicago. We have many more to cross off our bucket list (and hopefully Fiji, Bora Bora, or Maldives for our honeymoon). Of course, jet setting can’t always fit into our budget or schedules so we make sure to try different activities together whether its seeing a play, the ballet, going out for dinner/drinks in Cincinnati, or just hanging out with friends. We’ve also started to make a habit of collecting wine from either our trips or important dates, and saving a bottle for special events/moments. For example, the day we booked our venue, we cracked open a bottle from a trip to Napa. A year after our trip to Florence, Matt made me an Italian dinner at home and we cracked open a bottle from Tuscany. Obviously we can’t wait to get into a special bottle on June 2, 2018 to commemorate the biggest day for us yet
Matt proposed on November 11, 2016 in Ault Park in Cincinnati. Two weeks prior we had traveled to San Francisco and Napa as a celebration trip (I was ending a 3 month period of consistent travel for work in San Fran so we decided to extend my stay and Matt joined to celebrate the end), during which Matt had originally hoped to propose. Unfortunately his attempts to contact my father via phone to ask for my hand in marriage were unsuccessful, so despite packing the ring with him to California, he decided not to go through with proposing having not heard back from my father. I had kinda been expecting it to happen in San Fran or Napa, so needless to say, I was a little bummed. Fast forward two weeks later, after which the election had happened, another random work trip had popped up, so I was super stressed/distracted so Matt proposing was the furthest from my mind. He asked if we could take a half day that Friday and go to lunch since I had been in such a bad mood that week and he thought that would cheer me up. After lunch (at Mazunte, did I mention before we LOVE tacos/Mexican food), he asked me if I’d like to go for a walk in Ault Park. At first I was hesitant because even though it was sunny, I felt a little cold; however, he then convinced me by saying that since I looked so nice we could take pictures in the park for my Instagram (note: Jen loves randomly posing for photos and posting on the gram; yes Matt is a future #instahusband). Needless to say I was sold, and after walking through the park for awhile, we stopped under an archway and he said this was a good place to pose. So after snapping a few of me, he told me to turn around and look off in the distance so he can get something a little more “artistic” (to a normal person this sounds ridiculous, but had anyone traveled through Europe with us, they would understand that this is what a good portion of our trip looked like). When I turned around after he said he got a “really good photo” he was on one knee with the ring in hand. All I could do was laugh because in that moment all I could think was “I thought we were taking photos for the ‘gram!) Of course I said yes, and 30 seconds later his younger sister (the only person he had told he was proposing) popped out of the bushes with a camera in hand; he had her poised to be his secret photographer. We spent the rest of the day drinking a special bottle of Prossecco we had saved, sharing the news with our closest family and friends, then went out that night to celebrate more!