How we met
It was the dark days of COVID when Zach got a message on Hinge from a blonde French woman in November 2020. That message from Julie started everything, and to this day, Zach makes sure everyone knows she messaged him first. (In fact, he’s writing this website right now, just to make sure that part’s clear.)
After a few Zoom dates playing We’re Not Really Strangers, Zach drove from Brooklyn to New Haven for their first in-person date. Julie was finishing her PhD in Neuroscience at Yale, something Zach quickly got tired of repeating in small talk.
“Oh, that’s so nice! What does your girlfriend do?”
“She’s a scientist.”
“Wow, where?”
“She’s finishing her PhD at Yale.”
“Ivy League and future Doctor? What are you gonna say next? She’s a world explorer?
“She’s lived in 17 countries.”
“Incredible! So what about you? What do you do?”
“I… host a podcast.”
“When I first met Julie, I was thrown off. Her Hinge profile said she was French, but she sounded British. She told me that, yes, she was born in France and grew up there, but learned English at school in the UK which explained the accent. Then, I saw the pace at which she inhaled red wine and thought yeah, this woman’s French.”
- Zach
The Decision
Six months after their first date, Zach faced a crisis of character.
Julie was heading to the Netherlands for a few months as part of her PhD research, meaning they’d be doing long-distance barely half a year into the relationship.
Two paths lay before him:
Stay in New York, clinging to his comfort zone…
Or sack up, hop on a plane, and work remotely from a foreign country for the first time in his life.
The thought alone sent him spiraling.
No Brooklyn morning walks.
Pausing his Butcher Box Membership.
Too far from his favorite bathhouses.
And thousands of miles away from the boys.
How would Zach survive without his sunrise hits of NYC smog, endless supply of ethically sourced meats, and the East Village saunas he roasts in instead of paying for therapy?
And did he mention the boys would be thousands of miles away?
But then reality hit. He had everything he needed to go, and staying would only be protecting his own comfort.
So, he decided: screw it. He’d fly to the Netherlands and spend five glorious weeks with Julie in Maastricht.
Everything was lining up perfectly. Julie got there safely. Her apartment was beautiful, the neighborhood was charming, and Zach was set to arrive in less than a week.
All he had to do was pack his bag and grab his passpor—
Oh, shit.
Zach’s passport had expired a year earlier.
And this was June 2021, when post-pandemic travel was just coming back, and every passport hotline in America was a dial tone of despair.
Zach went to war with the U.S. Passport System.
He called every office in the Tri-State area, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and sat on hold for hours. Finally, miraculously, someone picked up.
“Hi, I’m leaving in a week for the Netherlands and need to renew my passport. What’s the next available appointment?”
The rep chuckled.
“Try in three months.” Click.
Zach stared at his phone, ghosted by his own government.
“Why do I even pay taxes?” he thought.
But Zach didn’t give up. He scoured Facebook groups looking for appointment swaps and combed Reddit threads for “how illegal is faking a passport?”
Ten years in prison.
Possible terrorism charges or human trafficking charges, or BOTH!
Both is where Zach drew the line.
Then came the last-ditch idea.
The Tri-State was too crowded, too apathetic. But what about…Vermont?
A place where people are treated like humans and still make eye contact.
He checked the Google reviews for the Vermont Passport Office, 4.3 stars, which is over a star higher than any other government office. Reviewers said things like “They saw me the same day!” and “Walked in, got a passport, left with my will to live intact.”
Zach refreshed the website: “No appointments available.”
Oh hell naw, He was going anyway.
He packed the car, grabbed his expired passport and paperwork, and hit the road before dawn.
At 7 a.m., he arrived. A woman was unlocking the office door.
“Hi, honey,” she said. “Do you have an appointment?”
“No,” Zach admitted. “I drove up from Brooklyn. I’m supposed to meet my girlfriend in the Netherlands in three days.”
She paused. “Lord, you drove up from Brooklyn? You poor thing. Come back at 8:30 and we’ll get you fixed up.”
And they did.
At 1 p.m., Zach walked out of that Vermont office with a brand-new passport, good until 2031.
Zach made it safely to Julie in Maastricht, and it turns out the Netherlands has small doses of smog, good meat, and way better bathhouses than New York.
Zach also called his boys because cell phones exist.
Morals of the story:
Never lose faith in humanity.
Don’t take legal advice from Reddit or you might end up in prison.
And for the love of God… CHECK YOUR PASSPORTS NOW FOR THE WEDDING.
“I knew Zach loved me when he drove up to Vermont on a whim with no guarantee for just the chance of getting a passport. It’s actually impressive how he turns his dumbest moments into romantic gestures.”
-Julie
The Proposal
True to form, Zach and Julie refused to do anything in a normal order.
So naturally, Zach decided to propose…six months after they were already legally married.
That morning in El Valle, Panama, everything seemed to align. The sky was clear, the air soft, and Zach had chosen the perfect spot, the India Dormida hike, where two years earlier they’d danced at the summit as the sun broke over the mountains.
This time, he’d arranged every detail: a sunrise proposal, a clear morning (according to AccuWeather), and a local photographer named Edgar, who would secretly tail them up the trail to capture the moment.
In Zach’s mind, he was a stealth operator on a classified romantic mission, part Navy SEAL, part Hallmark hero, smuggling a ring up a mountain under the cover of dawn.
Julie, meanwhile, wasn’t fooled.
They’d talked about this “special” trip to Panama. Then, the night before, she watched Zach refresh the weather app with the twitchy devotion of a man tracking a stock about to tank. Every six minutes, another check. Another glance at the sunrise timetable.
To make matters worse, she’d caught him furtively texting someone in the bathroom.
So in Julie’s mind, Zach was either about to propose… or start an affair.
The truth was less scandalous, Zach was just coordinating with Edgar, the photographer-slash-accomplice who would follow them up the mountain, ready to snap the moment everything came together.
The plan was simple, at least on paper.
When the sunrise hit that perfect golden hue, Edgar would text Zach one word: “India.”
That was the signal. The moment to drop to one knee.
The next morning, they hiked up the India Dormida trail under a blanket of pre-dawn silence. The air was cool and thin, the kind that makes you feel like you’re breathing coffee. They reached the peak with time to spare, thirty minutes until sunrise.
That’s when Julie’s suspicion meter started climbing.
Zach barely brings his phone on walks or hikes. But now, he was unlocking his screen every half minute like the world was on the brink of collapse and he held the nuclear launch codes.
Julie could see it in his face, some sort of countdown.
Meanwhile, Zach scanned the ridgeline until he spotted Edgar in position, pretending to take pictures of the horizon like a regular hiker. They locked eyes for a brief second, mission go-time.
The sun began to creep up behind the mountains, casting that first pink-orange glow.
And then… the clouds rolled in.
Lingering, teasing, clouds that turned the grand romantic reveal into a waiting game. Every time a sliver of sunlight broke through, Edgar would lift his phone, ready to send the signal, Zach’s heart would leap, then the light vanished again.
It dragged on so long that Julie began to doubt it. Maybe this wasn’t the big moment after all. The sun was already climbing, painting the cloud cover with flecks of gold, and yet, Zach was more transfixed by his phone screen than by her or the view.
Meanwhile, Zach sat beside his beautiful wife-slash-future fiancée, heart pounding, thumbs twitching, eyes locked on WhatsApp for the secret passcode.
And then, finally…
“INDIA!!”
A single shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds like a divine spotlight aimed straight at them.
This was it.
Zach turned to Julie, nerves and adrenaline colliding, and asked her to stand up and awkwardly dance with him, just like they had two years before at this very spot.
Zach dropped to one knee and opened the box.
For a split second, seeing no camera in sight, Julie’s brain split in two: half melting with joy, half screaming, “Is this idiot really not going to film this?!”
And then, because the universe loves chaos, a man with a camera strolled within a few feet of them, snapping photos like the sunrise was paying him by the click.
Can’t this guy wait two seconds? Julie thought. My already-husband is proposing to me!
Zach saw the look on her face, the perfect cocktail of confusion, joy, and mild homicidal energy, and interrupted his own proposal to clarify:
“This is Edgar, the photographer. Edgar, this is Julie.”
“¡Hola!”
Zach turned back to Julie, heart racing, words tumbling, he can’t quite remember exactly what he said, but it was something along the lines of:
“Will you marry me… again? This time in front of all our friends and family.”
Julie said yes.
And so Zach, Julie, Edgar, and a dog who decided to join the celebration shared a romantic hike down the mountain in the light of the golden Panamanian sunrise.
