When Sara and Matt first started dating they did a lot of talking. “I had an apartment, no Internet, no TV,” Sara says, “so we would just hang out, cook together and talk. A lot of talking.”
They had much in common: a love of classical music and movie sound tracks and the same favorite movie, Braveheart. After only five or six months, Sara felt like she had known Matt for years. “That’s when I knew that it was really serious,” she says. “He was unlike anyone I had met. He was very courteous, very noble-hearted.”
Sara introduced Matt to Yosemite and he was surprised at all he had been missing. When he later proposed, that’s where it happened. Along with another couple, Sara and Matt hiked to Glacier Point. At their destination, with the view of Yosemite Valley spread out below them and the ring in his hands, Matt got down on one knee. “Sara, if you look at the valley you’ll notice how beautiful it is, how wonderful it is,” he said. “But I want you to know that as beautiful as it is, it is still not as beautiful as you.” That was the part he’d been rehearsing in his head. Then he asked the question.
Taken by surprise, Sara says she gasped and said, “No, are you serious?” Then in her head she said, “Oh no, I just said no!” She corrected that with a quick, “Yes, yes!” and then they were embracing. She could feel Matt shaking.
On the day of the wedding, Matt first saw Sara as she came down the aisle. “She says I didn’t cry, but I know I was crying,” Matt says, “probably when the doors even opened, right when I caught a glimpse of her. I could not hold myself, it was really difficult for me, because she’s perfect!”
Breaking with both American and Mexican tradition, Sara had both her mother and her father walk her down the aisle.
Then the couple was face to face. “He looked so handsome and he was smiling, and his smile made me smile, and I could only half hear what was being said during the ceremony,” Sara says. “There weren’t really any thoughts.”
During the ceremony, the officiant—who was also Sara’s sister—cited Ecclesiastes 4:12, while the symbolic lazo was placed around first Sara, then Matt, connected in between. “Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken,” the Bible verse says. In the three strands, Sara explains, she is one strand, Matt is one strand, and God is the third strand—unbreakable.
Matt says he married his best friend. “Every day I get to laugh more, every day I smile more, I think more, I’m so motivated by her. I would not be who I am without her, and she is my world.”
— Margaret Snider
