“I suggested we go to Windy Point. We were looking at the city, it was night time, and she mentioned how twinkly the lights down in the city were. And I said this is pretty twinkly too, and I opened up the ring case,” says Ken Marrs, the orchestra and guitar teacher here at Sahuaro, of his proposal to his fiancee Tricia Cain. Yes, professionally-single Mr. Marrs finally is going to get married. The couple met through mutual friends while at a party and they instantly clicked. “I thought she seemed really, really fun and down to earth, like just easy to talk to and just real.”

Marrs announced to his classes in November with a huge smile, “I just wanted to let you know that I popped the question to my girlfriend.” This was met with applause and a million “Congratulations!” Everyone was excited for Marrs, including some former students who accidentally crashed their third date. “We were sitting in my back yard and I kept getting text after text that I tried to ignore and then finally I looked at one of them and it said ‘you have a gift outside your front door and I found a bag of marshmallows that they left. It had a note on it that said ‘see if you can guess who was here’ and it had all of the initials of the people who had come by. It’s like they wanted me to be single forever.”

The two have been dating for a little over a year and a half. “Right after we started dating, I did a bunch of traveling and was gone for like a month and a half. I’m not normally the type of person who misses people or keeps in touch, but we talked almost every night.” Marrs says that just talking to her was one of his favorite memories together.

Marrs can’t even cite his favorite thing about his fiancee saying: “There can’t be just one. I think that my favorite thing about her is that I don’t have just one.” He still listed several, counting them off on his fingers, “She’s very smart, she does a job that benefits society, she cares about other people, and she’s really, really pretty.” They also cook together, which is something that Marrs says he never really enjoyed doing until he was with Cayn.

The actual job of wedding planning hasn’t been started, but they are planning for a fall wedding with maybe 12 people. “We’re both old, we’re not really in need of the big huge white dress, the church wedding, the tuxedos and the bridesmaids gowns and all of the pomp and circumstance, we just know that we want to spend our lives together…but we are going to have a rockin’ party!”

We all wish the happy couple the best!