The Origin Story
The year was 2013.
Hopes were high in Athens, Georgia as the hometown University of Georgia Bulldogs opened the season ranked number 5 in the country.
But after a Game 1 loss to Clemson, and back-to-back losses to Missouri and Vanderbilt, the Dawgs were sitting with a measly 4-3 record as they headed to Jacksonville to take on the vile Gators of Florida.
A mediocre record did not stop a young Emma Evers from traveling down to Saint Simons Island with the rest of the school in anticipation of this game.
On Friday, November 1, 2013, she was walking on the beach with a friend, Chloe, chatting and enjoying the day when they crossed paths with two guys who also were walking the beach.
“Justin! Hey!” Said Chloe excitedly. Justin was an acquaintance of Chloe’s from high school. They reconnected and asked Emma to take their photo. Emma took 18 photos, all in different poses.
And then as a classic gag, she took a photo with Justin’s friend who was standing around waiting for the photography session to end.
They said goodbye and continued along with their day.
Georgia beat Florida 23-20 on Saturday.
Fast forward nine months to August 2014.
Emma needed a date to her sorority formal. She didn’t want to take too big of a risk, so she invited her good friend from high school, Jordan Taylor.
But Jordan Taylor had other ideas.
He had recently befriended a young Max Falcon, and quickly made the connection that Max and Emma would be a great match. In fact, he had decided back in the summer of 2014 that he wanted to set the two of them up.
So when Emma reached out to him about needing a date for the formal, Jordan recognized the opportunity to spring his plan into action.
In a move that would go on to permanently change the course of time, he selflessly convinced Emma to ask Max on the sorority formal instead of him.
The formal went extremely well.
So well that Max set up another date for them the following week. They were going to grab milkshakes on Wednesday night after his flag football game.
”It’ll be done around 8:00,” he told her.
But on Wednesday night, Emma waited by her phone for a text or call that never came in. At 9:30, she gave up hope. He was over her.
At around 9:45 though, a text came through. Max was at the hospital with a broken jaw.
She thought for a minute and decided that it was a decent excuse. He still wanted to hang out, despite his jaw and she agreed to pick him up once he returned home from the hospital and still grab a milkshake.
The very next day, Max underwent surgery to have his jaw wired shut. But his spirits were still high.
He bought a whiteboard and marker to communicate with Emma on dates, and she taught him basic sign-language. Things were going great. He even met her parents with a wired-shut jaw.
“So, Max, what’s your GPA?” Carmen Evers asked when they took Emma and her new strange “friend” with braces out to dinner at the Transmetropolitan Pizza restaurant, where he ordered soup.
Max held up 4 fingers, then made a 0 with his hand, indicating his 4.0 GPA so that Bob and Carmen knew what type of guy their daughter was associating with.
His GPA was actually a 3.5, but he called their bluff by knowing that they wouldn’t request and official transcript.
It was the week of the Georgia-Florida game when Max finally got his braces removed. He and Emma both were making the voyage down to Saint Simon’s Island for the game.
Emma was reviewing her photos from the previous year’s trip, when she uncovered something shocking: the photo she had taken with the stranger on the beach one year earlier.
It was Max!
When people ask, “How did you meet?”, Emma and Max usually just say that they were set up by a friend.
But the full story is that they crossed paths on crowded beach in 2013 and randomly took a photo together.
They didn’t take the photo together because they met, they met because they took the photo together.
Story of the Marriage
On November 8, 2014 Max and Emma became “boyfriend and girlfriend.”
Then, around six years later on December 4, 2020 Max and Emma became husband and wife.
They decided to elope for a number of reasons:
- Health Insurance
- Tax Benefits
- Love
- Contempt for the word “fiancé”
- Not wanting to plan a wedding in the midst of a global “pandemic”
The Reverend Minister Ashish Shah performed a “ceremony” in their living room where he pronounced them man and wife.
Emma and Max went to target the evening beforehand where Emma picked out her temporary wedding ring until Max was able to buy her a real one.
So romantic.
But what Emma didn’t know is that Max already had an engagement ring hidden away. So when Max told her that they were going to Athens the next day to “get engaged”, she had no idea what was in store for her.
They were already married, so the proposal was more of a formality than anything else.
They arrived in Athens, where Max planned several “fake-out” proposals to throw her off the scent.
Each “fake-out”, Max would drop to a knee on pull out the target ring, only to stop himself halfway through the proposal, shrugging and saying, “Ehh… this isn’t the right spot.”
When they reached the spot of the real proposal, Max dropped to his knee and asked her for the 5th time that day to marry him. She said yes, and he put the target ring on her finger.
They hugged and kissed in celebration, but as they were leaving, Max started with the same, “Ehh.. actually I don’t know..,” but Emma cut him off.
”No Max, this is the spot!”
Max smiled and said, “Yes it is, but that’s not the right ring.” And he dropped to his knee and pulled out the real one.
The Gniddew 