PHOTO BY ALEXA FRANKOVITCH PHOTOGRAPHY

Neither Chelsey Ptak nor Michael Evans was particularly looking forward to their first date.

“Both of us were at a point where I would say I was close to giving up on dating,” Chelsey says. 

Despite having gone through a series of bad dates, they both downloaded the dating app Upward on a whim and connected. Mike asked Chelsey to meet him on March 27, 2021, at Thorn Hill Tap House in Wexford. Afterward, they decided to go for a walk around North Park Lake, a spot that would end up playing a pivotal part in their engagement, just 364 days later. 

After their first date, Mike drove straight to one of the only stores open at that time of night and bought a notebook from the Giant Eagle in the South Side. 

“So that’s where I started documenting each day of our relationship all the way up until when I proposed and we got engaged,” Mike says. 

PHOTO BY ALEXA FRANKOVITCH PHOTOGRAPHY

Chelsey had no idea Mike was writing about every day of them being together, and Mike decided to use his letters to lead Chelsey through North Park to a spot where she would find him with a final letter, asking her to be his wife. 

“It was probably a couple of weeks of planning, figuring it out, finding letters I wanted to use, coordinating with everybody,” Mike says. 

On March 27, 2022, he told Chelsey they were going to meet his mom at Narcisi Winery in Gibsonia to celebrate her recent birthday. While she was getting ready, Mike left to “run to Walgreen’s real fast,” which is when he went to North Park to get everything set up. His sister had flown in from Boston and Chelsey’s mom, sister and brother were also enlisted to make everything happen smoothly.

PHOTO BY JEN QUALK – QUALK PHOTOGRAPHY

“I went through the entire 364 days and picked major milestones in our relationship and I printed those out,” Mike says. “I put them in these really nice letters and I hid them all around North Park.” 

When Chelsey made it to the final spot, she saw Mike standing under a tree with dozens of pictures of the couple wrapped around the trunk, and the final letter.

“It was so cute,” Chelsey says. “He had everything done so sweetly.”

That fall, Chelsey and Mike tied the knot at the Pittsburgh Botanic Garden. 

PHOTO BY ALEXA FRANKOVITCH PHOTOGRAPHY

Both Mike and Chelsey said despite how nervous they were about that first date (they discovered about four months into dating that they had both almost canceled), they knew immediately they had something special.

“If on our first date we can make it around the whole 5-mile loop without feeling awkward or not having anything to talk about, I knew after that that we were probably going to be for the long haul,” Chelsey says.