Our Story: Part 2
This is the second part of the story of how we met and got engaged! We will be updating with more parts as our wedding approaches. The full story can be found under "Our Story" in the site navigation menu.
Wednesday, August 24th, 2022
In walked Liam, joining Aidan, Olivia, and another friend as the fourth teammate at the table for a game of trivia at Atlas Bowl. Olivia remembers feeling inextricably drawn to this new person as Liam sat diagonally from her at the table that night.
When everyone was ready to leave, Olivia had the nerve to tell Liam they should hang out again, since Olivia was new back in town and looking for more friends. Liam agreed and Olivia asked for his phone number. Liam then stumbled over the digits, causing Olivia to jibe, “How do you not know your own phone number?” Liam retorted, “I know all the important phone numbers, like my mom’s.”
“Okay, give me your mom’s number then,” Olivia suggested. Liam laughed and said he wouldn’t do that. “Why? She might like me,” she joked.
Olivia does not use the words “love at first sight” to describe her experience meeting Liam. But undeniably something did happen, maybe just short of that. Looking back on Olivia’s recounting of the first few months of knowing each other, Liam thinks that Olivia was clearly madly in love with him from the very beginning. Olivia does not contest this, and argues Liam was close behind her.
Trying to play her crush off as coolly as possible, Olivia came up with as many reasonable excuses in that first month to see Liam and try to get to know him better as a friend before deciding when and how to make the romantic feelings more explicitly known. Having Aidan as a mutual friend presented many opportunities to spend time with each other, while not making it too obvious how much this time was enjoyed and sought after. Aidan had just adopted one of Olivia’s sister’s kittens, Keaton, who more than once gave Olivia an excuse to stop by their apartment with cat supplies and conveniently bump into Liam – in his own house. Aidan had also recently joined a new punk rock band, Microbes Mostly, and Liam and Olivia would often end up spending time together at Microbes’ shows around town.
Olivia continued to feel wonderful but uncanny. She tried to be diligent about not coming on too strong, she was a little weirded out by how intensely she liked being around this person she barely knew and thought it would likely weird him out too if she wasn’t careful. On his end, Liam claims to have been oblivious that Olivia liked him at all, let alone as much as she did. But they both enjoyed all the moments they spent together early on.
On September 25th, Liam and Olivia wound up next to each other at the Microbes Mostly performance for Ithaca Porchfest. After Aidan’s set, Olivia and Liam walked around together in the rain visiting other porch shows and got to talking about the significant role spirituality and religion had played in each of their lives.
Olivia shared with Liam that she was raised in the LDS Mormon church but left the religion over the course of many years. Not long after young Olivia started having questions about the Mormon church and her relationship with it, her father Kenny became terminally ill with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) in January 2013 when she was in 8th grade. Kenny was cared for at home by his family through the duration of his progressive neurodegenerative illness until he died February 29th, 2020. Olivia explained that her difficult experiences with and deconstruction of her Mormonism along with the progression and loss of her father to ALS had significantly shaped her life and beliefs. She didn’t have a label for what she was now, other than a mostly recovered Mormon, loosely agnostic.
Liam in turn opened up about his life’s journey with Catholicism. Being born, baptized, and confirmed a cradle Catholic in a large, multi generational paternally Irish and maternally Italian family, the Catholic Church was always a part of his life. It wasn’t until his early twenties while in college, though, that Liam started seriously developing his own faith and “reconverted” to Catholicism.
At the end of their walk around Porchfest, Liam drove Olivia back to her friend Sam’s apartment where she had a graduate paper to finish writing. Instead though, reeling from the discovery that Liam was a pretty serious Catholic, Olivia spent the rest of the night wondering what this potentially meant for her pretty serious feelings for him. She journeyed down many rabbit holes on Catholicism on the internet, muddling her already complicated feelings about the institution of the church as well as interfaith relationships (her father was the only non Mormon in her immediate family until he ultimately converted after becoming ill). Beyond her own partially formed feelings on the matter, she was left without answers as to how Liam might possibly feel in return about her lack of belief or church to tie it to. Olivia then did what only a 24 year old Gen Z could do in a moment like this – she anonymously posed her questions to strangers in a post to the exmormon subreddit. She also texted her best friends, who at this point had heard all about Liam.
The post stayed up for a week or so before she took it down. She didn’t get any ground breaking help from the people who gave her the perspective she sought, exmormons navigating relationships with people who weren’t in the same spiritual boat as them. Rationally she knew too that the only person she could really get meaningful answers from was Liam himself. So about a week later on October 1st, a particularly beautiful fall day, Olivia asked Liam if he’d want to go to the National Forest and play cards.
They spent 4 hours in a field playing the Russian card game Durak, talking until it was dark, cold, and their butts were soaked from sitting on the ground. While there Olivia tried to uncover as much as she could about Liam, his particular beliefs, and importantly if a non-Catholic was a nonstarter for him romantically speaking. Specifically, Olivia dared to ask Liam point blank if he could see himself marrying someone who wasn’t Catholic. Liam, not knowing how earnest this question was coming from Olivia, answered with a bit of a laugh. He said something along the lines of, “I guess when I picture it she’s Catholic, but I guess if I met the right person…” Olivia took the first part on the chin; she wasn’t nor wanted to be Catholic, and she accepted him at his word that that was not how he saw his life going. She went home feeling sure that Liam was a wonderful person, but disappointedly, not the right person after all and the “crush would have to die” as she reported back to her friends. She tried to spin it positively though, thankful that she sorted all this out before rushing in, and was sure she would be still able to maintain their friendship.
Liam and Olivia continued to spend time with each other regularly over the next few months – as friends. They continued to see each other at Aidan’s shows and at other events around town. They would take turns inviting the other to do something; a hike, to play a card or board game, or “carpool” to a show. Much later, Liam and Olivia would go on to dub these many days and nights together in the six months between meeting and their first date, their “plausible deniability dates”. By the end of October though it was clear the crush was not dying down as planned.
Olivia tried harder in November and December to move on by going on a couple dates with other people. Both attempts failed. Olivia was brutally stood up for a second date and Liam was there to cheer her up by hanging out with her at Trumansburg Winterfest. A couple weeks later Liam invited Olivia to go to Cornell’s yearly Christmas concert “Lesson’s and Carols.” On the ride home (they carpooled of course) they played their favorite Christmas carols for each other and talked about ridiculous names for babies. Olivia distinctly remembers Liam using the word “our” in reference to a name for a theoretical kid. The next day Liam realized he left his wallet in her car and had to crash Olivia’s date with someone else at Gimme coffee to pick it up.
As the holidays neared, Olivia decided getting over Liam was futile, and channeled her feelings by knitting him mittens instead. For his part, Liam was starting to finally acknowledge his own feelings for Olivia. Liam invited Olivia to his parent’s “Eve of Eve” New Year’s party. When Liam’s mom asked him which of his friends were coming to the party, Liam gave her a one name answer, “Olivia,” and she knew something was up.
In the new year they both separately started drafting plans to make a definitive move, without plausible deniability. Olivia surprised Liam by telling him she had a present to give him, and Liam invited her to share his birthday dinner and games with him and Aidan at their apartment.
There were several times around mid January that they made plans to do something, and both individually had to wonder before, during, and after if the other had meant for it to be a real date or not. Liam invited Olivia to see a Motherwort show, his family friend’s band, and they decided to get sushi beforehand. Liam asked to “carpool” again, split the bill, but also let Olivia borrow his sweater at the show. So Olivia went home not quite sure if Liam was on the same page after all. Olivia made the next attempt, trying to be more transparent, asking Liam if he wanted to come over for dinner and to watch her favorite movie, the 1987 romcom “Moonstruck.”
The hopeful date was set for MLK day, but that morning Liam and Olivia learned from Aidan that his dad Bill was in the hospital. They shifted their focus for the night and Liam helped Olivia cook soup and cookies for the Kaplan-Wrights. A week later Olivia left for a trip to visit her brother and sister in Arizona and took several weeks road tripping by herself through the south and mid west on her way home. Olivia asked Liam if he would take care of her cats while she was gone, so he came over the night before she left so she could give him instructions for them and cook him dinner as a thank you. Liam brought Olivia his dad’s homemade cider and cashmere socks for a birthday gift. They hugged goodbye that night, and Olivia knew by the time she got home something had to give.
Being apart was very hard for both of them. Olivia told her sister Elise about Liam as soon as she picked her up at the Phoenix airport, saying she knew it sounded crazy but she was going to marry him (yes, she actually said that). Liam and Olivia texted daily while she was away; Liam sending pictures of her cats and Olivia sending back pictures of the National Parks and old, beautiful cathedrals she toured.
Driving back to New York and Liam felt surreal to Olivia, like everything was about to change. After almost two weeks by herself in the car, she finally crossed back into New York and the landscape looked like home again. George Harrison’s “If Not For You” started to play, and she cried, feeling the full realization of how much she loved him, and how weirdly sure she felt that it was all going to work out.
When Olivia returned Liam was dead set on scheduling a date. The thing was, Valentines Day was coming up and Liam did NOT want to have their first date be on Valentines. Luckily, the Tuesday after Olivia got home, she texted Liam to alert him that the night sky was particularly beautiful and to go outside to look. When Liam went outside to see for himself, he started thinking about just how nice it would be to spend an evening looking at the starry sky with Olivia, and realized he had the perfect first date idea.
Over the next hour Liam quickly started putting together a plan, and after painstakingly going over the weekend forecast, he decided that Saturday would be the night. The sky was projected to be clear, with the moonrise not happening til late in the night. He then very casually, as if he wasn’t scrambling to put together a plan last minute, replied to Olivia, asking her to go stargazing. Shortly afterwards, the date was set.
As soon as the date was set, he realized that there might be some problems. Most notably, it was going to be well below freezing and the ground would probably be wet from rain earlier in the week – not fun. With everything else in place though, Liam wasn’t going to back out now. So instead he gathered as many blankets, sleeping bags, and pillows that he could get his hands on (thankfully he had accumulated many over his years in Boy Scouts) and bought the heaviest-duty tarp he could find.
With four sleeping bags, three blankets, two jackets, three pillows, and a $100 tarp from Lowes Liam felt that he finally had all the necessary equipment needed for their date. A part of him knew they didn’t really need all this stuff to have a great time together, but another part of him knew that it was going to be a really important night and he wanted to do everything he could to make it as special as possible.
There was time for one more evening of plausible deniability though. Friday night Olivia went over to Liam’s apartment, shared the dinner he made, and drove together to another Microbes Mostly show at the Kava Bar in Ithaca. The anticipation of the next night hung in the air, but as always, being together was naturally wonderful.
To be continued…