This Is
Our Story
It started on her first day in 2017, under fluorescent lights and bad coffee. Dana stood up in front of the agency JC worked for and introduced herself.
As time went on, coworkers became friends, and regular happy hours turned into full weekends spent together with the same group. As the friend group grew closer, so did Dana and JC. Their friends all saw it before they did. Looking back, Dana would describe that time as tunnel vision—everything else fading away when JC was in the room. JC calls her a “gravity well,” the kind of force that always drew him in. Three years of friendship followed, filled with road trips, concerts, and late-night meals after the bars closed.
Then the world slammed on the brakes. COVID hit, everyone chose their “quaranteam,” and Dana and JC lived within walking distance of each other in Midtown. They spent that summer together—days in Piedmont Park with Dana’s new dog, Finley, making up games, and slamming cabinet doors in perfect sync with the drum break from “In the Air Tonight.” One night, a card game went south. Dana lost. The punishment: one of JC’s infamous loser shots—this time, an egg yolk. She took it without flinching, and that was it. They realized they could do absolutely anything—or nothing—and be perfectly happy.
They started dating at the end of that summer and eventually packed up and moved to Dallas in 2022. After two years away, they moved back home to Atlanta with a cat named Marnie and bought their first house in Smyrna.
Last summer, they headed to Long Beach, California, for Warped Tour, where Dana crowd-surfed for the first time and learned you can crowd-surf into VIP without getting caught. The second part of the trip took them to San Diego, where, on the final night—exactly one year before the wedding—JC proposed at Sunset Cliffs.
