How We Met
I get asked a lot, how did an east coast girl end up married to a North Dakota farmer, and you’ll probably get one of two answers depending on the day you ask me. It’s either the long answer or the short answer. The short answer is that we met on farmersonly.com, which when we tell people that they totally believe and honestly probably makes way more sense then the actual truth. It’s kind of fun watching the way people react when we tell them that. Honestly, we are so bad at keeping straight faces that we usually crack and tell them shortly after that it’s certainly not the truth. The long story and the real story is that we met when I was 12 and Spencer was 18, and just about to graduate high school.
It’s crazy but it true! And I remember the moment I saw him walk through the door of my parent’s house with my cousin Ben. They were in town visiting for Spring Break from the boarding school where they met in Minnesota. Goodness did I think he was good looking, but I’m pretty sure he was thinking “who is the awkward middle schooler with these very long gangly arms,” (my arms were very disproportional for my body at the time haha). Since the moment I first met him, he always just seemed to be around. I continued to see him at family gatherings and friend’s weddings, and he became close friends with my brother. After my brother passed away in the summer of 2008, Spencer became even a bigger part of me and my sister’s lives. He stepped in and started to take on a brother role to us, calling us frequently to see how we were doing. At this point I still had a crush on him (which only my sister and her best friend Rachel knew about!), but never thought it would go anywhere because I was like a little sister to him.
As I got older and was getting ready to graduate college it seemed like we saw even more of each other due to mutual friends getting married, and the ability to travel more. Like the one time he and a friend were on a road trip to Florida and stopped through the town I was going to school in and stayed with me and my roommates for a night. In the summer of 2016 when I was living in North Carolina and I had gotten to the point where I was over trying to date, my sister called me up and said she had asked Spencer to be my date to our cousin’s wedding in the fall. I immediately panicked and my sister said well if you don’t want to bring him as a date she would, which of course I couldn’t let happen. So, then began the search for the perfect outfit for this wedding. As the time came closer, I grew more nervous because I never actually thought I would get the chance to go on a date with Spencer—even if it was just as a date to my cousin’s wedding. But the day finally arrived that Spencer was coming and when he showed up to my Aunt and Uncles house in Seattle, I hid from him instead of saying hi! A few hours later, I finally got the courage up to go say hi and responded, “When did you get here? I didn’t see you earlier.”
Our first picture together at my cousins wedding
The wedding day was beautiful and Spencer and I hit it off. We continued to spend the rest of the weekend together with our other friends. After the wedding weekend, we would switch on and off visiting each other. I even extended my ticket for another wedding I had in Minnesota for a friend so that I could go back with Spencer to North Dakota and visit the farm with him for the first time. I never felt more comfortable and myself with a guy, maybe it was because we already knew each other so well and had nothing to hide. As things moved along we talked about moving closer to each other. Spencer told me he unfortunately could not move his farm, so the only real option was for me to move to North Dakota. So in May of 2017 I packed everything up and road tripped with my mom from North Carolina to Fargo, North Dakota.
That first year was so much fun. Living in a new place and trying to learn how farming worked, but it didn’t come without its challenges. In November of 2017, my dad got very sick and we found ourselves in Chicago (where my dad was being treated for colon cancer) spending Thanksgiving at the hospital as my dad passed away. Without me knowing, Spencer was able to talk to my dad alone and ask him if he could marry me. Spencer later proposed to me in my apartment in Fargo while we were eating dinner with both of our moms. I think he had envisioned the proposal a little different and kept asking if I wanted to go out to eat that night, but I kept saying no because I wasn’t feeling well. But in the end it was perfect because he was the only one I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I never imagined my life turning out like this, married to a farmer in North Dakota, but I honestly couldn’t think of a better life with a better guy.