Wedding Shower Fun: Illustrate Your Love Story

You know those wedding showers where there is just a random mix of people? I had one this Christmas with my family, my future family, college friends, high school friends and church friends. 

It was super wonderful to be around everyone, but when it comes to entertainment, the crowd was definitely mixed. It wouldn't be the crowd to say, make dresses of ourselves out of toilet paper (for me, there's NEVER a crowd for that). 

Our party host thought it'd be fun for us to tell our "story" since not everyone has been around for the whole thing. So right before the shower we came up with the idea of illustrating our love story for the group. It ended up being a big hit, even for the people who already knew it. 

Plus, who doesn't like hearing a sappy love story at a wedding shower? Mix that with silly little drawings and you've got a fun, unawkward way to talk about yourself to a crowd. 

Literally, this could go any way you choose, but I'll tell you our story, as we told it. It also may be a fun way for you to get to know me and Joseph, since I'm going to be blogging about our super thrifty, big, DIY wedding. 

Joseph and I met his freshman year and my sophomore year of college in pretty awkward fashion. (Yeah, I'm six months older…scandal!) I was working as a server at Ruby Tuesday, and this professor notorious for tipping 100 percent of the bill came in with a group of students. I obviously jumped on the opportunity to serve his table. Only drawback? My ex-boyfriend, Joseph's friend, was one of those students. Oh, well, I made $100 and met my husband.

Eventually, Joseph and I started gaining mutual friends. We worked on the school newspaper together. It didn't take us long to start crushing on each other either, but there was that whole awkward ex-boyfriend/friendship code thing we had going on. Solution for someone who wants to say "Oh, I like you" but can't: Call them Favorite. (Yeah, that's the silly nickname we have for each other).

Homeboy started to phase out of the picture and me and Joseph were just all friends and such. We liked each other. People noticed. And they started to harass us about it in normal fashion. We just kept right on being Favorites and dating other people though, no problem. 

Two summers ago, we finally weren't dating anyone at the same time. And, we also were the only two people of our giant friend group left in our college town. Naturally, we hung out every. single. day. One day, Joseph's little brother Phillip joined us for an all day hang-out. Afterward, he hardcore harassed Joesph about why we weren't dating. Joseph told me about it, and it finally brought us both to admitting outloud that we "liked each other." 

This is pretty self-explanatory, right? 

When I told him, "We won't ever date." I accidentally meant, let me dwell on this for a while. So that's what I did. I thought about it in my head…what it would be like dating…if we would ruin our friendship…you know, the things overthinkers think about before getting in relationships. Then one day, I just asked him what he thought about the possibility, expecting him to take some time to think about it. Instead he jumped right on it, and we started dating right then (September 18, 2011).

(By the way, I didn't name any of these "acts" or "scenes." I just feel the need to say it).

Anyway, we date, it's the best thing ever and about a year later we get engaged in my apartment with Joseph telling me lots of sweet things. Now, I'm less than two months away from getting married.

Hope you enjoyed our story, and we'd love to see an illustrated version of yours!

—Holli Anne