How they met
Thirteen years ago Becca was driving by the fire station where Mark worked. Mark was in the parking lot doing annual training with his co-workers. Becca was lost and asked Mark, a stranger, directions. He gave them to her, and Becca sped off in a hurry because she was late for a job interview. At the time he wished she didn’t leave so fast, but he thought maybe he would run into her again someday. And sure enough, he did! Eleven years later he saw her again at a carnival, which was coincidentally only a few blocks from the fire station where they first met. Surprisingly, Becca remembered him, and together they rode rides and laughed the whole night. They have been together ever since.

The Proposal
One day Mark told Becca he had to do annual training at the fire station and needed to hold a public service event to get “points.” Each person counted as a point. So to help him out Becca brought lots of her friends and family together for the “training,” but what she didn’t know was that all her friends and family were in on it, too.

Mark proposed to Becca on May 8th at the Ofallon fire station. All of their friends and family were present, including a big fire truck, the chief of the fire department, and three of the department firefighters. Want to see how the whole proposal went down? Watch the video of the proposal below!

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Tags: Marriage Proposal, Real Couples

How did you meet?
Marcella and Tom met via a Yahoo! personal ad back in 1998.

How it all began
In late 1999 Marcella and Tom planned a trip to Sicily so that Tom could meet Marcella’s family. Tom is also half-Sicilian, and while he did not know any cousins in Sicily, he was very excited to see the country that his
family came from.

He remembered very vividly driving home from her house on his birthday (January 4th) and suddenly a great idea came into his mind — he would ask Marcella to marry him in the piazza of the town that his family was from. He figured his great-grandparents might have made their decision to move to America in the same spot, so it would be fitting that he would make it the place to ask Marcella to marry him.

Picking out the engagement ring

By April he had bought an engagement ring. Both Tom and Marcella had casually looked to figure out what style she liked. It turns out that Marcella’s best friend’s brother-in-law was a diamond broker, so Tom called him up, went over to his house and the diamond broker helped Tom pick out a stone. For the ring itself, Tom had a platinum ring custom-made by a friend’s father’s jewelry store in Philadelphia. It was based on a design that he and Marcella had seen in their travels.

The completed ring was in Tom’s hands by mid-April, and he hid it in his room for the next two months.

The Proposal

While in Sicily, Tom had several close calls to the perfect proposal, but he kept running into minor bumps along the way. During the entire trip he kept the ring box in his pocket, waiting for the perfect moment. One afternoon, as Tom and Marcella was walking through the piazza, he suddenly knew that he found the right place. It was dusk, the piazza was not all that crowded, and the scene was beautiful. To his left was the ancient Greek theater, to his right was a smoking Mount Etna, and in front of him were sheer cliffs overlooking the ocean below.

In 2000.

In 2010.

The scene took their breaths away, and Marcella said, “I don’t know how this could be more perfect.” Amid his nerves, Tom blurted out, “The only thing that would make this more perfect would be if you married me.” He then opened the ring box he had in his pocket.

She looked at the ring, then at Tom and then burst into tears as he put the ring on her finger. Tom said, “Well?” Marcella said, “You have to get on your knee.” Tom quickly handed his camera to the stranger standing next to him and got on one knee and asked her again.

She said yes! The couple went back to that same spot in Taormina three times over the last decade, and this year the couple went back for the anniversary of their engagement on June 23. In September 2010 the couple will celebrate their 9 year wedding anniversary.

Tags: Marriage Proposal, Real Couples