#LoveInspires me to love yourself.
#LoveInspires me to try again.
#LoveInspires me to love others.
#LoveInspires me to be selfless.
#LoveInspires me to believe in love.
Carrying on with the story of our engagement, today I wanted to share our love story, why I was inspired by Peter’s love to give love itself a second chance, and why together we chose a cable band David Yurman ring to be our engagement ring. You may already know a TL;DR version of how Peter and I go together from our engagement announcement post, but there’s a lot more to it that I’ve yet to share. It’s taken a lot out of me to be able to share the backstory to our relationship (ie. how we got together and why we work so well together) since it involves a tumultuous time of my life, but in sharing it, I hope to be able to inspire others who may be going through a tough time that love prevails and you will eventually find the one!
Let’s wind back almost 11 years ago. Way before Peter and I ever got together, and even before we knew that the other person existed. We both were in completely different relationships, and if I am to be candid, neither of them were healthy. I was young, he was young, and we both made mistakes that even though we don’t regret, life definitely would have been easier to not have to go through those trying times.
I grew up watching Disney, and my idea of true love was a Disney princess finding her Prince Charming. I was fresh into my first ever soon-to-be long-term relationship and head-over-heels in love with my partner at the time. Being young and impressionable, I believed that whatever happened, we would be able to work through it. So for the next four years, I spent a lot of time crying over false loyalty and learning how to trust someone blindly and to only have that trust be broken. I relied heavily on my friends to have a shoulder to cry on, and I don’t think that there was a single month that I didn’t shed a tear over something. It was definitely a trying time, but I learned so much about myself. I learned how to love myself, how to love others, and most importantly, I learned that I deserved to be loved as well. Long story short, after 4 years worth of continuously breaking up and getting back together, I finally called the relationship quits after I had been lied to one times too many.
Through the tough times, Peter was there for me and acted as my rock. My friends have a long-standing joke that the toxic relationship set it up so that any guy that I dated next would seem like an angel. And while there may be a certain level of truth to that, I quickly found out that Peter was genuinely a good and honest person regardless of the precursory situation. He was so good to me that it actually took me the longest time to understand that good people like that exist.
Since my previous relationship was the first serious one that I ever had, I’ll even go as far as saying that I had PTSD from the experience and came out of it expecting every single relationship to be similar and that all people were just as bad. That isn’t the case. Sometimes you come across a bad seed, and while it can be a terrible experience and you can mope and whine about what happened, you can also make the best of it and come away from it as a learning experience. And that’s exactly what I did.
It took me almost 1.5 years to finally understand that Peter wasn’t the type of person who would create a facade to lure me in, but that he was genuinely a good person. To this day I am still amazed that he is my future life partner and am constantly thankful to life for bringing us together. He has completely changed my outlook on love, and has inspired me to believe that I truly deserve to be respected by others and that I also deserve to make time to love myself as well.
Rewinding back to when we first began hunting for engagement rings, it was strange how none of the ones we saw in stores really stood out to us until I attend a preview for David Yurman’s engagement ring collection. Upon hearing David and Sybil Yurman’s love story and the meaning behind the cable, I knew that it was meant to be. To me a marriage is a union of love between two people, and the symbolism behind the cable band truly reflected that for me. Although I will be the only one wearing the ring, I always wanted the ring to have some sort of representation of the two of us, which is where the cable comes into play. Every time I look at the ring, I will be forever reminded of the two of us and how our live will forever be intertwined and how Peter’s love for me restored my faith in love, and inspired me to love back once again.
Photography Credits: The Dunk Listt
This post was produced in collaboration with David Yurman, however all views are 100% honest and my own.
