On September 14th, Sonja Lishchynki proposed to her boyfriend, Stefan Dumas.
It wasn't your average proposal for a few reasons. She was the one to get down on bended knee, she had the couple's adorable dog as a witness and she had spent the last two years planning for this moment.
Yes. Two years.
Lishchynki, who owns pet travel company Montecristo Travels, has a proposal story so romantic and wonderful that it will warm the hearts of even the most cold-souled people.
Dumas and Lishchynki are both travel bloggers, so it wasn't a surprise that their proposal took place in Prague. Aside from planning the trip, Lishchynki spent much of the two years prior creating the perfect ring for Dumas.
As Lishchynki writes on her blog, Dumas is a descendent of French author Alexandre Dumas, who wrote The Count of Monte Cristo (get the business name now?) and Dumas always wanted to be able to wear the family signet ring. The original was lost when the family emigrated to Canada, but Dumas had wanted to have it remade before his dad died.
"Maybe [it was] sold for passage fee or maybe [it was] just lost. I regret never looking up the details and having a new one made for Dad before he died. He would have liked that. I would have liked that," Dumas told Lishchynki, according to her blog.
For the next 18 months, Lishchynki had a replica created. She looked up archives for descriptions of the original ring and had a jeweler create one as close as possible to the original. This was the ring Lishchynki presented to Dumas when she asked him to marry her.
Lischynki hired travel photography company Flytographer to capture the moment (as travel bloggers, it wasn't unusual for the couple to have a photographer follow them around, so Dumas didn't think twice about this) and what was already a beautiful proposal story became an absolutely epic proposal photoshoot.
“Stefan was elated and surprised—but not surprised at the same time because we’ve never done anything in a traditional way,” Lishchynki told The Huffington Post.
“He cried. He was overwhelmed I think. But also elated and joyous. I think he was taken aback by how much it meant to him.”
Go home, everyone else. It'll be hard to top this.
instant happy in your
mailbox every day.