Amber and Luke met in their first semester of graduate school at the University of Illinois. Amber was continuing her studies from her recently completed bachelor’s degree at UIUC while Luke was fresh in from his move to Illinois from east Tennessee, not knowing a soul and looking to make friends as quickly as possible in a town where it became glaringly apparent there was not much fun to be had on one’s own. Much to his surprise, it turned out that the key to meeting people was his background in MATLAB (yes this is a love story born from coding). Soon Amber, among others, was more than happy to share a seat next to Luke in office hours or swing by his office to pick up a tip or two on how to get through dynamics homework with as little pain as possible, but as the semester progressed, what started out as professional partnerships soon turned into real friendships as homework sessions turned into pub-cycles and study groups started meeting at bars instead of libraries. Soon Amber and Luke found themselves two pieces of what had come to be quite a tight-knit friend group.

The semester rolled on, as did Amber and Luke’s friendship, and soon, Luke found Amber to be a dependable companion in many of his more trying times in Champaign. She drove him to clear out his car at the body shop after it was totaled. She helped him haul all the junk it had accumulated back to his tiny apartment at the corner of Clark and Randolph. And she drove him to Chicago to catch his flight home for Thanksgiving so that he could purchase a new car and no longer rely on her as a personal chauffeur. When Luke got back from Thanksgiving, he gifted Amber a print of a photo he had taken years before at one of his favorite spots near his home as a token of appreciation for helping him get back to that very place he called home.

Then Christmas came and went and the New Year (and new semester) arrived, and Luke found a marked change in his day-to-day life in Champaign. As his doctoral research got more focused and his coursework more nuanced, he found himself spending more time in the statistics department on the main quad and less time in Newmark lab with the rest of his compatriots. And while he was still lucky enough to catch many of his newfound friends at sporting events or weekend outings, he very rarely anymore saw Amber (aside from 3 seconds every Tuesday/Thursday as they passed each other on the Engineering Quad). Truth is, he missed her quite a bit, but it was quite apparent that the days of naturally being around each other had come and gone. If he wanted to spend time with her he would have to make a concerted effort, so he did.

What was Amber and Luke’s first date is up for debate. It could certainly be argued that it was the night he first had her over for dinner at his apartment; though there really was still a more platonic air to the situation given the general lack of romantic charm in his Champaign apartment and the fact that he left early to go play pool with his friends. Having probably the more valid claim was a couple of weeks later when they went together to the Illinois-Penn State basketball game followed by a late-night burger at the only restaurant still open: Red Robin (yum). Either way, by the time Luke returned from his spring break getaway in Portugal it was apparent that what was once a friendship was becoming much more than that. The two made their first appearance as a couple at (where else) the spring barn dance, and by the end of April 2023 were bona fide boyfriend and girlfriend…just in time for Amber to graduate with her master’s degree and leave Champaign behind.

In the summer that followed, Amber and Luke enjoyed the last few months they had together before officially becoming long-distance. Amber made her first trip to Luke’s home, and Luke had his first stay at Amber’s grandmother’s in Sauganash. These were wonderful times, and the very beginning of what would become an endless list of adventures the two would embark on together. Then in late June, Amber began her career at Benesch, moved to Chicago full-time, and left Luke behind in Champaign. Over the next year their relationship was largely carried out over a screen with nightly calls and synced up episodes of Love Island and The Bear. As often as was possible Luke would take the two-and-a-half-hour train ride from Champaign to Chicago’s Union Station to spend the weekend at Amber’s grandmother’s house. Much less often, Amber would drive down to Champaign to stay in Luke’s dingy apartment, and more often than now seems possible, the two would go on some adventure to one place or another for a long weekend or holiday, including a backpacking trip in Michigan, a frigid stay in Madison, Wisconsin, a Thanksgiving sweep through West Virginia, and a summer road trip to New Mexico and back. And so things went for the better part of a year and a half.

Then, in the fall of 2023, Amber and Luke’s long-distance relationship became anything but when Luke decided to leave his PhD program to join the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill as a structural designer full time. The two soon moved in together into a 700 square foot apartment in the middle of downtown Chicago. For the past three years they have lived there, sharing in day-to-day life: walking to work, walking back, going shopping on Saturdays, grabbing coffee on the way back from church on Sundays, hosting monthly game nights, taking music lessons, and finding joy in the everyday tasks of adulthood.

Then, on New Year’s Day of 2026, nearly four years after Luke realized that if he wanted to spend more time with Amber he’d have to man up and ask her out, he once again realized that if he wanted to keep spending time with her forever, he’d have to once again man up to ask an all important question. And so, early in the morning, under the guise of getting some sunrise photos, the two headed up to the national park, to the very spot where many years ago Luke took the photo that became his very first gift to Amber four years earlier. And there he asked her to marry him – and the rest, as they say, is history.