Never have either of us been ones to believe in "true love" but we both believed in some sort of perfect timing or rather, God's timing. Thankfully our story is ultimately one that waited to be started at the right time and is now one of our favorite stories to ever be written. When we first became aware of each other, I was beginning my first year teaching at South. Tyler was still at China Grove Middle, but had taught almost all of the students I was starting to teach during their middle school years.
These students were pretty much all of my seminar homeroom students. Most of the days during seminar revolved around them trying to find me a boyfriend, and Mr. Downs' name was always thrown around. One night Callie, one of our shared students, got him to add me on instagram at a football game. He did, I accepted, and that was that for a while. Ironically enough, we ended up matching on both platforms.
Unfortunately, I talked myself into thinking I was not his "type" and that we would not have much in common.
I made a lot of assumptions, which isn't right but easy to do behind a screen, and Tyler never fails to remind me of that when this comes up.
Looking back on it now, I do regret it, but I think God knew I needed to work on myself and that the timing wasn't right yet. After I "ghosted him", as Tyler says, a year or so had passed. I was now in my second year of teaching, and the end of the year was approaching. I was teaching an integrated class of English 1 and Civics. I was still teaching students that also had Tyler at the middle school, that loved him dearly. Specifically, Laurel. I assigned my class a final project known as their "Campaign Project".
