San Francisco City Hall Wedding Photos | Hunter and Igor

This is going sound weird: Hitler. Wait, give us a chance to explain!

We both decided to give online dating a spin (because other than boring conversationalists and serial killers, what could go wrong?) and had joined OK Cupid, which gives users the option to answer a huge and varied list of question. I (Igor), had this little gem of an answer pop up on my landing page randomly:

Q: Is it ever ok to kill someone?
A: Ok, I know I’m supposed to answer “no” here and I know I’m Godwin-ing myself but, c’mon guys, Hitler. We can all agree that it’s ok to kill Hitler, right?

She was cute, had exactly my sense of humor, and knew what Godwin’s law was, so it was biological imperative to message her.

Igor: It wasn’t an all-at-once thing, but a series of small realizations and experiences over the course of our relationship. There’s the easy stuff: I love her, spending time with her is pure joy, SHE ACTUALLY LIKES WATCHING ME PLAY VIDEO GAMES. But more than that, we never got tired of spending time with each other, even after a two week road-trip in a tiny coupe. We never ran into an issue that we couldn’t communicate and collaborate our way out of. And frankly, the idea of being without her became unbearable.

Hunter: Igor is one of the few truly good people I’ve ever met and he doesn’t even realize how exceptional he is. I knew from the first time we met that he was funny, and smart, and very attractive but it wasn’t until we’d been dating for a few weeks that I realized he was also a ridiculously good person. We were walking my dog (Jackson) and ran out “waste” bags, but ended up needing one more. We were pretty far from the house and Jackson had done the dirty deed in an out of the way bush that was on an unclaimed strip of vacant grass by the road.

Igor, without a thought, started walking back to the house to get another bag. It never occurred to him that, without any consequences, he could just leave it there. My deeply cynical little head is always running a cost-benefit analysis of my actions, but he automatically subjected himself to inconvenience just to make the lives of complete strangers a little better, without any hope of personal gain from that action. 

He’s incredible, and being around him not only makes me happy, safe, challenged and content, it also improves my Alignment. I’m a very lucky girl.

Igor: We had started playing this super nerdy board game, Twilight Struggle. It’s based around the cold war and you play against each other as the US and USSR trying to influence the world to their sides. Most of the gameplay is accomplished by playing special game cards that cause events to happen and influence the board in some way, things like “Romanian Abdication” or “Warsaw Pact” and I got the idea to propose by making a “Marriage Proposal” card. I had a date picked out and managed to find a day to myself while Hunter was out with friends to go hard on Photoshop. I used a PDF the game company had released of some expansion cards, changed the text (including somewhat usable rules for actually playing the card), changed the picture to a black and white, vintage-fied photo of a diamond ring, and edited the sleeve of a spanish language release of the deck to be in english, matching font as best I could, since I couldn’t find an english version of the card sleeve. Then I sent it off to a custom playing card print house, only for the delivery date to come around and the card to not have been shipped yet. I got in touch with them a few days later only to find out that it had been Chinese New Year and they weren’t working during that time. I eventually got the card and adjust plans to be able to pop the question. Apparently, I did a little too good of a job because when I played it, she thought it was an actual game card and responded with “Ha-ha, sure”. After I got her to compare it to one of the real cards, she realized I was serious and had me re-ask. Then there was mostly just happy crying and excited repetition of, “Yes!”.