Our Story
It Started Over Tea in Insadong
We met in the MoChamp Lounge at Brown, but things really began on a trip to Korea in sophomore spring. Both of us were sure the other didn’t feel the same — so every morning Michelle slipped out early to study, and every morning David guessed which café she’d gone to and happened to show up. Through midnight cherry blossoms, a chair we built together, and long conversations that clicked in a way neither of us had felt before, it got harder and harder to pretend we were just friends — until one of our last nights, outside a karaoke bar, Michelle fell asleep on David’s shoulder.
David didn’t sleep that night. The morning after, he asked Michelle to a tea house in Insadong; she was quiet the entire subway ride, certain he was about to say it had all been a mistake. He wasn’t. Over tea, he asked the question he’d been carrying the whole trip, and April 5th, 2021 became our day. It still is.
Since then it’s been two and a half years together in Providence and two and a half apart — Michelle at Brown Medical School, David an engineer in New York, then San Francisco — and the lesson of both: love is less something you feel than something you build. On December 27th, 2025, at Echo Lake in the White Mountains — after a day of freezing rain that cleared just long enough — David got down on one knee and asked one more question.
She said yes.
