Our story…

 

His Story:

April 27, 2007. It was a clear, cool Friday night in Santa Monica. I had just moved to LA about 6 months prior to start a new job at Yahoo! Sports. That evening, I had made last minute plans to go out with Bel and her friends who were visiting for the weekend from SF. I knew Bel at the time because I had just reached out to her recently to help me file my taxes (she was an accountant). To thank her for all her work on my tricky taxes, I thought I would invite her and her friends out for dinner/drinks while they were in town. It was just a casual invite and I didn’t think too much into it at the time…

The night started off at a cute Italian outdoor bistro. As I sat down, I immediately realized something… although Bel and I shared a couple of mutual friends in San Francisco, this was the first time that we had gone out together. Nevertheless, the initial awkwardness quickly passed as we quickly found we had a lot of common interests. As the night went on, the conversations continued on, and the drinks flowed endlessly 🙂 The rest of the weekend was a wonderful blur of chatting, drinking, and dancing. We had the best time together, and we both couldn’t wait for the next time to see other.

Over the next few months, we tried our best to spend as much time together despite our distance between each other. I found myself flying up to SF about 3-4 times a month. This semi long-distance SF-to-LA relationship continued on for over a year before I was able to transfer my job at Yahoo! closer to SF – the Yahoo! campus in sunnyvale.

Fast forward 4 years and I’ve left Yahoo! to join a new company called Salesforce located right in the heart of the city. (No more commuting to the South Bay! Hooray!) Bel is no longer an accountant and is now working at GAP Inc., so we are now able to carpool together to work since our offices are less than a mile away from each other. We’ve also managed to scrape together our savings to purchase our first home in Diamond Heights. Looking back, so much has changed in both of our lives over the past 4 years, and we couldn’t be any happier. We both look forward to all of the future adventures together.

 

Her Story:

April 21, 2007. It was a freezing Friday night in San Francisco and a bunch of us were at Mr. Smiths celebrating the end of another exhausting tax season for me. The place was packed, drinks were flowing, and I was so ecstatic to have my friends and cousins around to party it up (ah, those were the days!!)! Towards the end of the night as everyone was on the dance floor, I sat on the side for a break. Dean, who recently moved to LA and had me prepare his tax returns, came over to chat and thank me for helping him. He offered to take me out the next time I was visiting LA – turns out, I already had my annual girls trip planned for that following weekend in LA, so I casually took him up on that offer.

The girls and I rented a car and drove down to LA the following weekend.  Being my usual self, besides our hotel stay, nothing else was planned. I decided to take Dean’s offer to show us around and met him up in Santa Monica. After a nice outdoors dinner, we headed to Boulevard 3 with Dean and his cousin Kelcey. Couple hours later, after some good dancing, drinks, and a surprising confetti drop, as we were making our way through the crowd, Dean and I realized that we were holding hands – even after the crowd subsided and the music stopped. I’m not a touchy feely type of person, and though we really didn’t know much about each other, it just somehow felt right. And the rest is history!