Once, when we were dating, Jackie asked me how much I loved her. From my heart I answered, “to the moon and back.” Little by little, as our relationship deepened, the answer would change. “I love you three times to the moon and back”, I would say. “I love you four times to the moon and back!” The numbers just kept on going up.

In a few months, Jackie wanted to know how much I would need to love her to marry her. A pretty cool question. Without thinking I answered: “85 times to the moon & back.”

From that moment on when she asked me how much I loved her, the number would increase by leaps and bounds: “I love you 12 times to the moon and back!”, “I love you 23 times to the moon and back!”, “38!”, “44!”, “70 times to the moon and back!” 85 was coming at us fast!

"Look, it’s a message in a bottle!"

Fast forward to August 2004, I flew out to visit Jackie in Los Angeles, where she was working for a couple of weeks. After a lovely day together, we ate dinner at a quirky restaurant on the beach in Malibu. We decided to take a stroll along the water and ended up on a blanket watching the sun set over the ocean. As Jackie kept her eyes on the sky, I snuck out a small glass bottle with a message I’d written inside and hid it in the wet sand. With a little help from me, she stumbled across the bottle moments later. “Look, honey!” I said innocently, “It’s a message in a bottle!” Curious, Jackie picked the bottle up, uncorked it, and pulled out the scroll. As she read the message tears sprung to her eyes. It said:

“I love you 85 times to the moon & back”. She knew what would happen next.

By the time she looked up, I was on my knee holding the ring. I asked her to marry me. Jackie fell in to my arms and said yes. We were married on November 3rd, 2006.

To this day, I still tell my wife I love her 85 times to the moon and back. And now I get to tell our little daughter Lucy that I love her 85 times to the moon & back as well.

So there you have it, that’s our story. We’d love to hear yours.