Our Story
We first met in the summer of 2015 in Oakland, California. We hit it off, pretty quickly and decided to give our relationship a serious try. Since then, we've been building our relationship and falling deeper in love everyday. Now we're ready to start our next important chapter and hope you can join us in celebrating this exciting milestone.
How We Met
It was a summer night in Oakland. Our mutual friends Jess and Seamus were throwing a party at their home near Temescal. We began chatting above the party hubbub, eventually trading increasingly bad jokes back and forth. Ben, as always, had brought some little games to play with guests. After a few rounds of play he "made his move" and gave Kelsey a business card cause he's classy like that. Several lovely dates followed thereafter.
Our Home
After dating for over a year across the Bay Bridge we decided it was time to move in together. Craigslist to the rescue! Following a thorough Oakland-based search (color-coded spreadsheet and custom scoring index included) we lucked into a marvelous apartment in downtown Oakland steps away from the gorgeous Lake Merritt. We set up our home surrounded by the things we love including plentiful art, music, and games and have been living there quite happily with our two cats, Ame and Taiyo, ever since.
Engagement
Our particular engagement story took us down a long and winding road, starting with a motorcycle ride to a lovely antique store in Petaluma, California. There we found a radiant ring that instantly spoke to both of us. We planned on taking some time out of an upcoming Hermann family trip through Eastern Europe to use said ring in a proposal. Sadly, Ben's checked bag never arrived, jewelry and all, but undeterred our proposal went ahead on August 9th in Prague following a memorable meal. We followed our hearts to a secluded park next to the Vltava river overlooking the Saint Charles bridge. There, replacement ring in hand (purchased in Krakow days before), we reflected on our journey so far, set intentions for the path ahead, and Ben popped the question!
While we don't have many photographs of the actual engagement, our awesome photographer, JP Lor, did a photo shoot with us in our favorite date spot, Tomales Bay. Please feel free to click on this link, select "enter as guest", and use the password "belsey" to see our photoshoot.
What's Next?
We're about to find out! And we hope you'll be there with us along the way. We hope to stay in the Bay Area for the foreseeable future as we start this exciting next step in our relationship. But after that who knows!?