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Whitney grew up visiting Sea Island, off the coast of Georgia: “When I was 11 or 12, I saw a wedding while on vacation and announced to my mom that I wanted to get married there too,” she remembers. “And we love that we can revisit the exact spot where he proposed whenever we’re back in Vail!” “It was the perfect day in the most special place,” Whitney says. There was a photographer hiding on the other side of the path, and they celebrated with a mini engagement photo shoot. Wilson pointed out a famous mountain across the way, and while she was looking, got down on one knee to ask Whitney to marry him. “I had an idea something special might be happening when he politely suggested I change out of workout clothes into something ‘a bit nicer.’” She was right-when they got to the top of the mountain, they went on a short hike. “After we arrived, Wilson immediately suggested we go to the gondola for a ‘birthday hike,’” she says.
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They had been dating for three years when, on Whitney’s 25th birthday, Wilson-who works as a technology investor at Blackstone Group-surprised her with a trip to Vail, Colorado, where her family has a house.
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“The week after, we ended up at the same house for a Coachella weekend and spent every minute together!” “We have tons of mutual friends and met that spring at a friend from college’s birthday party in San Francisco,” Whitney, now an elementary school teacher at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights, remembers. The year after Whitney graduated, she was living in Stanford, and Wilson was in Palo Alto. Whitney Ford and Wilson Bowen both attended Stanford-but they were two years apart and only knew each other distantly while in school.