Emily & Caleb are such a sweet couple. They met and fell in love at Virginia Tech and are going on Young Life staff together after the wedding!! They wanted to do an engagement shoot at a rustic farm that had long fences and woods around them. The Rittler family is friends with a family that had the perfect farm for their shoot! There was still snow on the ground from the storm and it reflected the light beautifully!

Here is their love story!

Caleb and I met on the Saturday of our very first weekend as freshmen at Virginia Tech in the fall of 2011. We both went on a hiking trip for freshmen looking to get involved in Young Life, and I hopped into the back of his car with a couple other new friends as we headed off to the Cascades. We had a mutual friend that had told us to keep an eye out for one another, and after we had made the connection, conversation flowed easily. After that weekend, we continued to show up to the same events, began making the same friends, and very quickly an easy friendship grew. Caleb was always kind towards me, making me laugh and seeking me out. He was someone I instantly connected with, and by the end of our first semester at Tech he had become one of my best friends. We shared the same taste in mostly everything, and we never ran out of things to talk about. From the beginning I knew he was someone special, but I had no idea what was ahead for us.

Pretty much from the beginning of our friendship I was drawn to Emily. She was instantly someone I wanted to become better friends with and to know deeply. So even before I knew what it was I felt for her, I put in a lot of time and effort to ensure I held an important place in her life. I convinced her to take classes with me. After class I would insist on walking her back to her dorm because it was “on the way to my friend’s dorm” when I would actually just turn around and walk back to my room. The more time I spent with Em, the more I wanted to, and throughout those first two years our friendship got deeper and deeper until we couldn’t continue moving forward until something changed. So we ended up having a lot of long hard talks and a lot of confusion in our friendship until both of us separately realized what we had began to feel about each other. Eventually, in April 2013 we got together, talked, and I told Emily that I had started to like her, and she felt the same. Two weeks later, we started dating, and I had already long since fallen in love with Emily. Six months later I told her I loved her.

So I decided to propose almost a year later, started to get my money right, talked to both of our parents, and began to make a plan for a proposal. On Saturday Dec. 13, 2014, I took Emily to Heritage Park in Blacksburg, a place where we had been many times before for sunsets and walks and talking, both before we dated and throughout our whole relationship. We sat on the same park bench we always do, talked like we always have. Finally when we were about to leave, I got down on one knee and asked her to marry me! She eventually said yes after a long pause, smiling and watery eyes. Afterwards we drove around for a while and I brought her to her house, where her roommates had cleared out a space for us to be together and process the big news. Then we met our families for dinner and went back to my house to be welcomed by a big group of our friends!

What a beautiful story! Enjoy Emily & Caleb's sweet engagement session!