ABOVE: Michelle and Karie Valdes, hoto by Sophia Hyde.
As difficult as the COVID-19 pandemic has been for most people, Michelle and Karie Valdes might not have ever fallen in love and gotten married without it.
“I honestly don’t know what it would have been like without the pandemic,” Karie said. “It’s a bad thing, of course … but it brought us together.”
Before the pandemic, though, the two simply admired each other from afar.
For years, both have been active in the Plant City area. Michelle actually lived and worked in the city, also running her nonprofit, Operation Paying It Forward. Karie was involved in that community but lived nearby in Mulberry.
They initially crossed paths at a series of 2019 networking events. They didn’t speak at the time but felt a “pull” to one another. By early 2020, when the pandemic started and the isolation set in, Michelle’s networking group began meeting online daily for happy hour.
“Literally every day we were on Zoom. We got very close,” she says.
One day, a couple months into this new pandemic routine, Karie showed up for the gathering.
“I’m sitting there in Zoom, having a drink, chatting with everyone and her image shows up on the screen,” Michelle recalls.
A million thoughts ran through her head: “That’s the girl. She’s on Zoom. What is she doing here? Who invited her to our happy hour?”
Michelle adds, “And she was looking as beautiful as ever.”
She turned her camera off momentarily in a panic. After she calmed herself, she turned her camera back on and their relationship grew from there.
They eventually exchanged phone numbers and began having their own video chats separate from the group. Then, an avid reader – especially on the subjects of positivity and self-improvement – Michelle told Karie last May that she was sending her a book to check out.
“’It’s a good book. You’ve got to read this book,’ I told her,” Michelle says. “The book wound up being two dozen red roses.”
Karie says, “There was a knock on the door. Nobody was out there and on the table was this huge thing of roses. I looked around like, what the hell is going on?”
The card attached to the arrangement said, “Hope you enjoy your book.”
She was casually dating a man at the time and unsure what to do about Michelle. Not long after the flowers were sent, she went on a trip to St. Augustine with her boyfriend and two sons.
“I was trying to date this guy. Trying to make the square things fit in the round hole kind of thing,” she says. When their Zoom group found out about the trip, she told them, “Too bad you can’t all come up here.”
So, several of them decided to surprise her in St. Augustine. Michelle wasn’t convinced of the trip, at first.
“I’m not super spontaneous,” she says. “I don’t travel much. I’ve got to plan.”
One of their friends in the networking group convinced Michelle to go, however, telling her “to go get your girl.” When she arrived at the hotel, “that was the first time on the trip that I was actually happy,” she says. “There was actually joy there.”
They’ve been together ever since, having built a strong foundation for their relationship because of the pandemic.
“It really did speed things up,” Karie says. “We knew in 2019 when we first saw each other that there was this fire. This gave us the time to really talk and get to know each other.”
Michelle planned to propose during a trip to the Georgia mountains for Thanksgiving with Karie’s family. She scrapped that idea when she learned that Karie’s niece was likely getting engaged on trip.
Still, she had a ring waiting for that perfect moment. Since early in their relationship, Michelle set a new tradition for them. No matter how busy they were with work and everyday life, they’d make a few minutes to put on some music and have a dance party.
“Every day, we set aside five minutes just for us and we’d dance to a song,” Michele says. Karie said she questioned the practice at first, but it soon became an essential part of her day.
“To me, it was beyond important. It went from first being an awkward thing to ‘I need this,’” she explains. “It was a huge part of our growth as a couple. Let’s cut the world out and take three to five minutes and just dance to a song or two.”
One morning in October, they took a long walk together. During this walk, they both got emotional as they talked about their mothers, who they both lost in recent years.
When they returned home, still feeling raw from the conversation, they did what they normally do before a busy workday: played a song and danced. While dancing, Michelle reached into a desk drawer and pulled out an engagement ring. They both kept dancing, and Karie, crying, eventually said yes.
They married six months later. “It’s everything I’ve ever dreamed of,” Michelle says.
Engagement Date: Oct. 29, 2020
Wedding Date: April 10, 2021
Wedding Venue: Still Creek Farms, Lakeland
Officiant: Rev. Lance Hurst
First Dance/Wedding Song: Luke Combs, “Better Together”
Theme/Colors: Sunflowers with navy roses, country rustic
Wedding Planner: Kreative Events (took care of flowers, cake and décor)
Photographer: Sophia Hyde
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