Jamie and Chris had a beautiful wedding at the La Canada Country Club in La Canada, California. As I stated on their engagement post, Jamie and Chris have a very unique relationship. Jamie and Chris are both Missionaries, and have spent a good amount of their relationship apart from one another. Take a look below at their awesome story:
How we met
Chris:
We’ve met online actually. I was just about ready to leave the dating site when Jamie caught my eye. One last try I thought and wow….. it worked!!!!!
Jamie:
For me, I actually didn’t sign up to it myself, my friends got it for me for my birthday. I thought since they paid for it, I’ll give it a try. To be honest, I didn’t like it at all! Most of the guys didn’t read my profile, they just want someone to talk to. When Chris messaged me, I thought to myself another random guy, ok, I’ll be nice, he won’t see me tomorrow. But surprisingly he read all of my profile, and that’s how the friendship began.
How our long distance relationship has worked out:
It was very hard, but I have to give the credit to Chris. He tried to make himself available and even changed his work schedule in order to talk to me. I didn’t want to do video chat or talk on the phone right away, so we used email. Soon after I felt more comfortable, knowing he’s sincere and we’re actually going somewhere, so we started to chat through Skype.
Since I was in China and Chris was in New Zealand, the 4 hour time difference wasn’t that hard, plus the cheap international messages. Things got harder after I moved back to LA, bigger time difference, working schedule between the two of us, higher international messages, etc. But we learned to be more flexible/available with each other’s schedule, plus with the iPhone, and different apps that helped us to stay connected throughout the day.
Open communication is the main key. Our time on Skype was precious, so whatever issues/conflict we had, we tried to deal with it right away and always remained open and honest with each other.
We often joke around with people telling them we don’t go on cheap dates!! or we only go on dates that involves us flying half way around the world, it’s true in our case 🙂
How Chris Proposed………
Jamie and Chris flew to China for a date, where Jamie used to live and work. Jamie flew in from LA & Chris flew in from New Zealand. From the first day of the trip, Jamie had an idea Chris was going to propose but just didn’t know when. And since Jamie had planned out their every day schedule while in China, it was even harder for Chris to surprise her.
On the morning of the proposal day, Jamie was thinking in her head, is he going to pop the question or not? It’s almost the end of our trip……. But nothing. That day was spent with a friend touring around the City of China where Jamie used to work, showing Chris all the sites. Along the way, Chris made a couple of bathroom stops, which Jamie later found out, were to change into his proposal t-shirt etc.
The last stop was the mountain top where Jamie used to go to for her quiet time, the view up there was beautiful overlooking the entire city. Jamie used to take people up there to pray for the city. That afternoon, they did the same thing; enjoyed the beautiful view and prayed. As they were praying, Jamie heard the sound of paper blowing around in the wind (it was windy) and as Chris was praying he started to repeat his prayer over and over (super duper long prayer). FINALLY he finished, and Jamie couldn’t help but turn her head to find out what the paper noise was, because there shouldn’t be any paper at the mountain top. That’s when she saw the WHOLE company (people she was close to and worked with) were standing behind her holding a paper each saying, “Jamie will you marry Chris?” “YES!”
Jamie was totally surprised because she had set up the everyday schedule and made it hard for Chris to propose, but he managed to fit it in least where Jamie expected it to be and on top of that, invite a whole lot of friends to be a part of it!!
Then Chris read a poem to Jamie. The poem was about the journey how Jamie returned HOME to LA and all the different challenges she had to face and how much she missed her China home where she lived for 3 years. Then Chris unzipped the jacket he was wearing, the T-shirt he was wearing said: Jamie will you marry me? Everyone was so amazed by how romantic Chris is, but Jamie being herself, as random as she always is was a bit more surprised about Chris’s t-shirt than the actual proposal and said, WHEN DID YOU CHANGE YOUR SHIRT? and then realized THAT was the reason why Chris had to go to the bathroom so many times 🙂
I told you their story was amazing
-Jen and Mike
