Jess and Collin’s story starts long before either of them realized it had begun.

Jess went to undergrad in Colorado and would often come back to visit friends, see live music, and spend time in the mountains she loved. At the time, she was finishing her master’s degree in Hawaii, but Colorado still felt like a second home.

One New Year’s Eve, Jess flew back for a String Cheese Incident show with a group of friends. When she walked into the house before the concert, she saw Collin standing there in overalls and an outer space shirt, and for reasons she still can’t fully explain, she saw him in a completely new light.

That night, in the middle of the music and the crowd, they kept finding their way back to each other. Collin lent Jess his gloves to keep her hands warm, and something about the whole evening felt different. Easy. Magnetic. Familiar.

After the show, Jess started feeling intense pain in her stomach (spoiler: it was a kidney stone). While everyone, including Collin, confidently reassured her she’d be fine and that it was just gas, she was in too much pain to sleep. So Collin stayed up with her the entire night until the sun began to rise. They talked about music, life, science, design, travel, dreams, and everything in between. Somewhere in those quiet, late-night hours, a connection formed that neither of them expected, but both of them felt.

The next morning, as Jess was about to leave, Collin sprinted outside before she got into the car and asked her on a date before she flew back to Hawaii.

She said yes.

What followed were five months of long-distance calls, texts, plane tickets, and adventures between the Colorado mountains and the Hawaiian islands. The distance wasn’t easy, but it made one thing very clear: this was something worth building.

When Jess finished her master’s degree, she moved to Denver and moved in with Collin.

And the rest, as they say, is history.