Proposal Story

The Meaning Behind it All

Why so much effort you may ask? Well, Leah is very special to me, and I thought that I would show her just how special she is by essentially referencing each major milestone we had encountered thus far in my proposal. Those references in order being: The website (when I asked her out), The books (first anniversary), The pictures on the website (second anniversary). You can say the reference to the third anniversary was the ring (I got her a necklace), however that may be a bit of a stretch as it’s a proposal… you need to have a ring.

The Books

The idea came about shortly before our first dating anniversary. I was looking for something meaningful to get Leah, and spent a week or two perusing the internet for unique ideas, when I stumbled upon someone’s Etsy page that offered folded books for sale. I was intrigued by the detail of the books the seller had to offer, so I looked around for some tutorials, realized it wasn’t that hard, and decided that is what I was going to do for our first anniversary together. I knew for this, it was best to pick a hard cover book, and I figured I would choose a book that was meaningful to her. The obvious choice was Harry Potter, as it’s Leah’s favorite book series, however there are 7 books, which one’s her favorite? That idea passed after only a few seconds, and I realized the best choice would be the first book of the series. After all, it is our first anniversary, it’s the start of the series, and this was honoring the start of our story together. When it came to deciding what to fold the book into, I knew pretty quickly I would fold our anniversary date into it. But I still couldn’t get past the fact that there were six other books. I figured if I was going to do this, I might as well make a cool story to go along with it. So after some thinking I decided what the remaining books would say, before I even ordered the first. I would use the first book as a gift that stated our dating anniversary date, the following books 2-6 to state “Leah will you marry me?” and the final book to display our wedding date. This was all kept a secret until the proposal, and the last book was kept a secret until the wedding rehearsal. The decisions were made, the plan set, and the first order was placed. I then followed the instructions available on the internet, folded the book, and gave it to her for our one year anniversary. Upon un-boxing it, it nearly brought her to tears; which is exactly the effect I was going for. Upon seeing this reaction, I knew the next time I did this, it would go just as well.

Fast forward 2.5 years to May 2019, when I finally decided to propose. I dusted off the old template for the first book, ordered books 2-7, and prepared for what would be one of the most tedious things I would ever do. I opted to start with the largest book, and work backwards in order of size, which gives you book 5, 4, 6, 3, 2, or Marry, You, Me?, Will, Leah. I won’t bore you with the details, but I started the first fold on 5/28/19, and folded the last page on 7/9/19. It took 11 evenings (sessions) to complete, with a total time spent of roughly 26 hours and 15 minutes, and 1260 pages folded, out of a possible 1515. Keep in mind that each page is actually folded twice, so really, 2520 folds were made. If you would like to see more stats, feel free to contact me, and I would be more than happy to show the spreadsheet I made to track my time, and stats. Also for those interested, the average time spent per page was 1 minute and 15 seconds. So, by July 9th, the 5 books needed were ready, and it was on to the next phase of the planning process.

Note: Fear not, the Books will all be on display at the Reception, and potentially the Ceremony as well. If you have further questions on how the folding was done, feel free to ask.

The Website

Once the books were complete, it was time to add a little more to the proposal. I felt that the books weren’t enough, and it was about this time that I figured I would try and reference each milestone we had encountered in the one proposal. So, when I asked her out, I built a website for her that at the time was available at leahisawesome.com. This domain is no longer mine, but the site lives on elsewhere. If I remember later, I’ll link it here. Anyway, I built her a site, with the goal of just being something additional for the proposal, but also something that could be shown off or otherwise referenced after the fact. I opted to gather about 120 of our pictures together from just before we had started dating, to the most recent I had available, resized and renamed them appropriately, and stuck them on a web server for easy access. I knew from the beginning I wanted a cool mosaic like design for the site that had all of our pictures sorted chronologically. I think the original style design came from Pinterest, however I wanted fewer columns, full screen, and auto scrolling, as well as some dynamic resizing for smaller devices. In fact, if I wouldn’t have made it scale so well, I wouldn’t have been able to embed it below, or at least with as much ease as I did. I then went through 4 or 5 iterations of the site when building it, running into a different problem in each, and fixing it in the next. By the last iteration, nearly all problems had been resolved, and I had sunk about 8-10 hours into building the site over the course of a couple days. Now, the site was live on this domain (coryandleah.com), however Leah didn’t know I had purchased it yet, so I wasn’t too concerned with her finding it.

The Master Ball

My last content style idea for the proposal came pretty last minute, and that was in the form of the ring box, which was a plastic toy master ball, with a small foam piece glued in it in the shape of a flower. For those who aren’t familiar with Pokemon, a master ball is a variant of the famous poke ball. Every ball in the Pokemon universe has a catch rate, and the master ball has a 100% catch rate. In the games, you can only get one, and whatever you use it on, you are guaranteed to catch. Basically, she couldn’t say no ;). I went with this idea for a few reasons, the first being that when I asked her out, I made a bunch of cheesy puns and pickup lines in javascript pop-up windows (like the ones you get when you are about to navigate away from a page with unsaved changes on it), one of which read “If I had a master ball, I would use it on you.” At the time, she laughed at all these, now she’d probably roll her eyes, but alas, I decided to keep one of them for the proposal. The next reason was that we both enjoyed Pokemon growing up, and have even more recently played through some of the newer games together, or at least side-by-side. I just felt it was a great way to tie in something we both enjoyed where it really fit. When it came time to propose, I reiterated the statement as I reached for the master ball, timing when I said ‘master ball’ with when I brought it into her view. She laughed, I proposed, and that was it. The master ball now sits along side the books to add to the story.

The Plan and Execution

The initial intention for the proposal, was that it would happen on July 26, 2019; however, when attempting to locate a photographer to capture the moment for me, everyone was busy that weekend for some reason. I went through nearly 10 different photographers before realizing it would be easier to change the date. I really only had two options for days though, as part of my thinking for getting her to dress up a little was that I would take her out to celebrate one of our birthdays. So it could only really happen either the 19th or the 26th. We had initially made plans for the 26th, but when I could find help for the 19th, and not for the 26th, I talked her into celebrating her birthday on the 19th, and mine on the 26th. Still not suspecting a thing, I got the date moved to the 19th, ensured I had a photographer that was available to assist, and prepared. The photographer and I visited the site a few days prior to discuss my vision, and talk through what all would happen. He took some test shots, we decided on where the cameras would be, and verified how all would work out. A day or two later was the 19th, and it was show time. After work, I ran through the whole plan with the photographer again, got a gps tracker on my phone so he could tell when we were on our way and when we arrived, and ensured he had everything he needed. When Leah arrived at my apartment after work, she was dressed in athletic shorts, and a tank top. I panicked internally, but knew she couldn’t have possibly gone to work in that, so she had to have nicer clothes in her bag. It wasn’t terribly difficult to convince her to change without giving anything away, however I was already dressed nicer, and I recall her saying “It’s my birthday, I can wear what I want.” Thankfully, she agreed to change, I think I said “You can where whatever you want when we celebrate my birthday, just wear something nice today.” Not sure if that was necessary, but I just needed to make sure she wasn’t wearing shorts and a tank top for the proposal. After that, we headed to The Cheesecake Factory for dinner, spent about an hour and a half eating dinner, but by the time we were done, it wasn’t quite dark enough for the effect I was going for in the library, so we needed to delay a bit longer. We wandered around the mall for about a half hour, which killed enough time that it was dark enough for the effect. We traveled to the Library, we entered through the back door, and headed to where I would propose. I was pretty nervous, but knew she wouldn’t say no… until she kinda did. Anyway, we approached from the side, she was thrown off by a laptop cart that had been moved in the way of her path (there’s a desk there with a path behind it that she would always take, so I put a large cart in the way so she couldn’t walk through). I remember her saying “whoa” while staring at the cart, but she kept walking, which was the important part. After her mind wandered from that, her eyes were attracted to the glow of the Christmas lights, however given where she was at that moment, there was a pillar blocking her view of the books. She took a few more steps forward, saw the books, and froze. I was a few steps ahead of her the whole time, and stopped/turned around right about the time she froze. After about a month and a half of planning, everything came together perfectly, exactly as intended, all without her having any clue. To put it in her words, “I wasn’t expecting anything” and “completely blindsided.” After the proposal, we spent the next couple hours walking around campus with our photographer (all of us alums, and I a current staff member), taking photos in locations meaningful to us. Places such as where we first met (also where I proposed), where we first talked for hours (“the bench”), where we consistently stayed up way too late watching movies resulting in the worst academic semester of my college career, and where I initially asked her out (west basement), where we had our first class together, and ‘moment’ together by saying ‘challenge accepted’ in response to the professor stating his papers could not be written the night before (CL206). And that, is the story of our engagement.

The Links

Links to all previously used sites can be found here: