Let's start at the beginning...

We'd like to think that anyone reading this doesn't need too much of an introduction to us, but just in case: Hello, we're Steve and Chandler and after 7 years (and counting!) we are finally getting married!

Allow us to take you back a few years, to the origins of our story. Picture a drizzly, cold March evening in 2015... A (slightly tipsy) girl named Chandler was on a girls night out in Southampton. At the same time, Steve (who, it's fair to say, was more than slightly tipsy!) was also enjoying a few drinks with his housemates. These two groups met and boogied on the dance floor and then later on bumped into each other again in the bar down the road. Drinks were bought, numbers were exchanged and the next morning (texting with fairly fuzzy heads) we arranged our first date. A week later, after a disastrous game of pool, (for Chandler, who plays abysmally anyway. But also for Steve, who sacrificed his normally impeccable game to allow her to win!) we were smitten!

The chapters of the years that followed are full of many fun memories together, and with our loved ones, with bouts of travel in-between. In 2017, after months of pinching the pennies, we had saved enough for a backpacking trip through South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand. During that time we fell in love with the ginormous country that is Australia, so we boomeranged back there in 2019 to explore some more.

This particular chapter of Australia most likely has enough up's and down's, characters and plot twists to fill an entire book! We arrived in Brisbane towards the end of 2019, then set off in our rackety campervan in March 2020. And we all know how that particular year will go down in the history book... For us, we spent most of the pandemic rumbling our small van along as far as we could take it in-between state lockdowns; a van which we called home for 15 months of our time in the land down under. It's probably fair to say that if we can survive that, then surely we can survive anything!

So we zoom forward in our story now to one particularly sunny afternoon on the Whitsunday Island, where Steve interrupted crucial sunbathing time to ask Chandler to play their favourite game... Monopoly Deal. And in this particular round it turns out they were both winners, as Steve knelt down (on his good knee, not the dodgy one) and used his last card to ask Chandler to marry him. Spoiler alert: she said yes!

And here we are now in 2022, back home in the UK and who knows where we'll go next. One thing is for sure: we're ready to start the next stage of our grown up lives! And we can't wait to celebrate that with you on our wedding day.