His Story


May 27, 2011
The day started early in the morning.  Her dad had a business meeting with a few other people from the stake and he had invited me to come along.  Having known why I was visiting Ohio in the first place it was very kind of him to present me with the opportunity to talk with him about marrying his daughter.  Whitley’s mom and dad had already impressed me with their kindness and the effort they made to make me feel comfortable in their home; I really appreciated that because I am kind of a shy timid person until I get to know someone very well.  On the car ride over to the restaurant we were meeting at, her dad and I started talking just about whatever and one thing led to another and we started talking about marriage.  I won’t go into detail how the conversation went but suffice it to say that it went very well. I gained a great respect for Dan Regovich that day and I look forward to getting to know him better in future years. 
When Dan and I arrived back home Whitley was still getting ready for the day.  So I took that opportunity to go and prepare myself for the task at hand.  I went downstairs into the basement where I had been sleeping while i visited Whitley and her family.  Out of my back pack I pulled two boxes one contained a watch.  Whitley and I always had an inside joke that we were going to just get engagement watches because they were much more practical and useful in the world. The other box contained the ring I had brought with me to Ohio.  I had had the ring for several weeks already and was so ready to give it to her, many nights I would sit in my bed and look at the ring and think about how I would ask her. 
              
It had rained a lot the past few days in Ohio but we could not have asked for a more perfect day to go out together.  Whitley drove us to a nature reserve just a few minutes away from her house, the place was beautiful and I could not have picked a better place to have asked her to marry me.  We walked around the park on trails for about 20 minutes.  The whole time I couldn’t wait to finally pop the question but I had no idea what I was going to say.  All I knew was that I had both a watch and a ring and I somehow wanted to incorporate both items.  After walking for a few minutes we crossed a bridge and with the running stream in the back ground I stopped and said “Well I guess this is as good of place as any.”  I Turned to face her and told her how much I loved her and how special she was in my life.  To my surprise I wasn’t nervous at all, even though we had talked about getting married a lot I still thought I would be nervous but what I was about to do felt so right I had nothing to fear.  I got down on my knee and took the larger watch box out of my jacket, I looked up at her as I opened the box and asked her to marry me, she said yes and started to chuckle a little bit and told me to get up.  I don’t know what was going through her mind but I was not done, I told her that I was not done and had something else for her.  I pulled out the ring box and took out the ring that she had fallen in love with months prior to this moment, and I re-asked her if she would marry me and she again said yes. 
I got up and we hugged and held each other close for a minute and then decided to finish our walk.  It was the happiest moment of my life.  When Whitley and I first started spending a lot of time together my jaw and cheek muscles hurt because I was Whitley made me smile a lot more than I was used to, as we finished our walk I was smiling so big and was so happy my cheeks again began to hurt but I didn’t care.  So we finished our walk and then went and got lunch.  Later that day we took our engagement pictures at the Kirtland Ohio church sites and went out to dinner.  This will always be one of the most important days of my life.