Hunter & Mauren

Hunter: I first met Mauren in our Operating Systems class at Auburn. There were a couple of people I knew in that class and they knew Mauren so I sat a few seats down from her. Finally after a while I decided to sit next to her and then we started talking to each other. After class one day, I walked with her all the way across campus despite my next class being in the same building as the one we were already in. Mauren calls it "stalking" but I was just walking and talking.

Mauren: I don't think Hunter and I had spoken in class before the day that he walked with me to the bus (this is why I called it stalking. I didn't know the guy!). I apparently wasn't too disturbed by the situation since I let him walk with me to class the next day. That was the day he got my phone number. Shortly after that I was eating lunch with a friend and told her that I wasn't sure if Hunter wanted my number for romantic reasons or so we could do work together in the class. Looking back, I think the answer was both.

After Mauren and I had been talking for a few days I decided to ask her out on a real date. Not being very creative, I asked her if she wanted to go to the Marvel movie that had just come out (Shang-Chi). I picked her up at her apartment and we drove to the nicer theater in Opelika. After the movie we were hungry so we decided to go to Korean BBQ since neither of us had ever been before. It was a very fun experience (even though Mauren kept getting onto me for accidentally touching the raw chicken to the clean utensils) and we both really enjoyed it. Obviously, my cookie-cutter date plan worked out.

Hunter: I wanted to go somewhere outdoors with a great view and somewhere that we'd been before. My idea was to go to this great overlook of Santa Fe called Atalaya Mountain. In my memory, the hike to the top was uphill but not too strenuous; how wrong I was! Halfway up, I would have quit and gone back to the bottom were it not for the ring in my pocket willing me to continue like a reverse One Ring. When we finally made it to the top, I found a great place to put my phone on the tripod I brought and film us (at this point Mauren was still oblivious to my plans), but naturally my phone wasn't working right. So we ended up using Mauren's phone to film the proposal. Finally, after all of that, I pulled out the ring and got on my knee. There was a mixture of excitement, laughter, and tears that made it hard to get the words "Will you marry me?" out, but I finally got it and the rest is history.

Mauren: Hunter had wanted to do the hike up Atalaya mountain the day before the day we actually ended up going. I wasn't feeling the best that day and knew that I'd need to be at my best to tackle that hike, so we went the following day after work. We had hiked the mountain before and I remembered the constant uphill switchbacks and rocky terrain made the trail a little strenuous. I think Hunter had forgotten about all of that because halfway up he looked like he was fighting some sort of great internal and external conflict. We finally made it to the top, had a few snacks, and decided to take some pictures. Hunter's phone wouldn't work so we used mine to take a video of the view before we went back down. That's when he asked, and we forgot about all the previous difficulties of the day. It was perfect.