Happily Ever After (Amy and Jesse Berline)

While my husband and I met in New York City, Birmingham is a huge part of our love story. It is where Jesse proposed to me, where we got married, bought our first home together, and had our first baby (with one on the way). But first I need to begin with how we got here. Jesse and I met in New York City in 2013. We were friends first (actually for two years before we started dating)—who became best friends—until we realized we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together (well, I knew this long before Jesse did…more on this later). It was the summer of 2015 when I first visited Birmingham. I came here for what was supposed to just be a weekend with Jesse while he was here visiting family. That long weekend turned into two whole weeks (and was when Jesse started to realize that I was “the one”). Not only did we fall in love with each other, but we fell in love with Birmingham. Jesse grew up here, but before us moving here in 2019, he hasn’t lived in Birmingham since he was in high school (when he left and went away to boarding school, college, and then spent the next 20 years in NYC). So, the Birmingham he knows now is very different than the Birmingham he knew as a teenager (back in the early 1990s). I grew up and went to school in Buffalo and moved to NYC after college where I spent the next 17 years. After us both spending nearly two decades in NYC, we knew we were ready to settle down and for a more relaxed lifestyle – we’d “been there, done that” long enough in the big city. The idea of living in a cute and charming, family-friendly “small” town – but one that is walkable and close to “civilization” (as a New-Yorker would put it), was way more appealing to us at this point in our lives. We got engaged in December 2017 (Jesse proposed to me at Café Via and then we went across the street to Social to celebrate) and married in August 2018 at The Community House. Here we are now four years later living in Poppleton Park with our one-and-a-half-year-old little boy Blake, and are expecting another baby in September. And while we’ve only been living here for four years, we have already created so many wonderful memories everywhere around town. Birmingham is our happily-ever-after.