Chris and I met in 2019. We went to the same high school, and although I didn’t know it at the time, Chris did. One day, while I was shopping at the mall where he worked at a clothing store, he approached me and asked for my number. We talked about going to the same high school, and then I went about my day as if nothing had happened. Two weeks later, I got a text from Chris. What started as a simple conversation quickly turned into a friendship, and before we knew it, we were spending nearly every day together. For about a year, we became the best of friends before life took us in different directions. Eventually, we became nothing more than familiar faces on Instagram posts and Snapchat stories. That all changed when we reconnected after a few months apart. From then on, we knew we wanted to be in each other’s lives for good. By that time, Chris had moved to Illinois for a job that would soon become a huge part of our life together.
In July 2022, Chris was working on a race team and traveling constantly, but that didn’t stop our relationship. While visiting Arizona, he asked me to be his girlfriend. That one question changed everything. We quickly became experts at long-distance dating, traveling to different states just to see each other and Chris spending every holiday and every free moment he could in Arizona with our friends and family. Somehow, the miles never felt like they could keep us apart.
When Chris’s race team was bought out and everything moved from Illinois to North Carolina, our next chapter came sooner than expected. Shortly after he arrived, Chris called and asked if I wanted to move to North Carolina at the end of the year. As the youngest in my family, having never moved away from the house I grew up in, no one thought I would actually do it. But I knew that if moving meant getting to build a life with Chris, I would do it in an instant. In December 2022, we packed up all of my belongings and moved across the country to North Carolina. We started our life together by moving into a house with two of Chris’s coworkers, experiencing a new sense of freedom and figuring out what our future would look like. With Chris’s job being so demanding, the adjustment wasn’t always easy. I spent countless days searching for a job and many nights sitting in our new home wondering what life would look like once we finally settled in. But through all of the uncertainty, we had each other.
Before race season began, Chris and I decided it was time to add another member to our little family. On March 4, 2023, we brought home our spunky, outgoing, and very spoiled boy, Jack. He quickly became the best dog we could have ever asked for and completed our family in a way we didn’t even know we were missing. For the next few years, we traveled to different states, watched countless races, explored places I had never been, and made memories we will carry with us forever. What started as Chris’s race team became a second family not only to him, but to me too.
In November 2025, we made the difficult decision to pack up the life we had created in North Carolina the past 3 years and move back to Arizona to be closer to our friends and family. Little did we know, that move would lead to one of the most unforgettable moments of our lives. While making our way across the country, Chris got down on one knee in the middle of Texas and asked me to marry him. I may have been freezing, wearing sweatpants, and completely unprepared for what was happening, but my answer was never in question. Of course, I said yes.
Once we were back in Arizona, we knew we wanted to capture this season of our lives through engagement photos. That’s when we found Sami Jo. From the very beginning, she created a space where we felt comfortable, safe, and completely ourselves. She gave us the engagement photos of our dreams and captured our relationship in a way that felt so true to us. As we look ahead to our wedding day on August 21, 2027, we truly cannot imagine anyone else capturing such an important chapter of our story. Because of Sami Jo, we don’t just have beautiful photographs, we have the memories to last us a lifetime and bring us back to the moment in each photo.
And now, after years of friendship, long-distance love, cross-country moves, countless races, one very spoiled dog, and a surprise proposal in Texas, we cannot wait to begin our next chapter together.
-MARISSA MAHONEY
