Our story began at Penn State, in a place neither of us expected to find anything resembling romance: the Rodgers Family Trading Room.

We were both competing for spots in the Nittany Lion Fund, one of the most selective and demanding experiences at Smeal. Every semester, roughly one hundred students competed for only a handful of seats. We were both ambitious, both competitive, and both very aware that the person sitting across the room was competing for that same spot.

So, naturally, we spent several late nights studying in the same room without speaking to each other.

Eventually, after enough nights of quietly sizing each other up from across the trading room, we finally introduced ourselves. What started as a conversation between two competitors quickly became hours of talking, joking, studying, and finding excuses to keep the conversation going. Soon, we were studying together regularly. Then we both made it into the Fund.

The rivalry survived, but now it came with friendship.

From there, our lives started overlapping more and more. We scheduled classes together, spent more time together outside of the Fund, and became best friends almost before either of us realized it was happening. We even competed together in a Stock Pitch Competition in Boston, where we won and took our first weekend trip together.

Somewhere along the way, there were also a lot of dates that neither of us actually called dates.

There was never one dramatic moment when everything changed. It happened gradually. Chris realized that Annie had gone from being the person he always wanted to spend time with to the person he never wanted to be without. She became the first person he wanted to tell everything to, the person who made ordinary moments better simply by being there, and the person he began imagining in every version of his future.

What started as friendship slowly became something much deeper.

After Penn State, life gave us the chance to find out what that kind of love looked like outside of college. We introduced each other to our families, navigated the pandemic together, moved to New York City, built careers, traveled the world, and learned how to support each other through the difficult parts of life as much as the exciting ones.

Through all of it, we became a team.

One of the clearest moments came during a trip to Peru in August 2022. It was just the two of us, far from home, exploring somewhere completely new. There was no grand revelation or dramatic declaration. It simply became obvious that wherever we were, and whatever we were doing, life worked best when we were doing it together.

That feeling only deepened when life became harder. As we faced loss, change, family milestones, and the realities that come with growing older, we stopped simply imagining a future together and began understanding what it meant to truly build one. We learned how to show up for each other when things were difficult, while somehow still finding ways to be ridiculous, laugh at ourselves, and keep life from ever becoming too serious.

By then, the next step did not feel like a question.

On June 8, 2024, after months of meticulous planning, Chris proposed at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Annie had a feeling that a proposal might be somewhere on the horizon, but the moment itself still managed to surprise her.

She said yes.

Looking back, our story has never really been about one perfect moment. It has been about all of the small ones that kept adding up: late nights in a trading room, classes we chose together, trips around the world, moves, celebrations, difficult days, inside jokes, and countless ordinary moments that somehow became our favorite ones.