Written by our dear friend Hallie Miller

Ali and Marcelo can’t remember meeting for the first time, nor can they recall the first words they exchanged. But they know they shared a 1st grade teacher and would sometimes sit together in class. Marcelo wrote at the time that his future wife liked French fries and playing “ZINGO!”

“I like her,” he scribbled when Ali was the “big knish,” or the friend of the week. He drew a picture of them standing side-by-side in the grass with a few clouds and a bright sun overhead.

It would take almost two decades for those small feelings to mature into a big love.

In the meantime, the two shared a group of friends at Beth Tfiloh and spent years laying the foundation for a future relationship. Ali cheered on Marcelo on the soccer field and basketball court, and he posed for pictures that she posted on Facebook under album names like “dj turn me up, ladies this your jam.”

It wasn’t until college at the University of Maryland, though, that their friendship took on a life of its own. Ali joined Sigma Delta Tau sorority and would often socialize with Marcelo’s Zeta Beta Tau fraternity. They sometimes set each other up for date parties, and they would always be sure to link up at tailgates or in grimy off-campus satellite houses, even just for a quick hug.

After graduating in 2018, Ali and Marcelo both moved home to Pikesville for a bit before heading down I-83 to start their adult lives in Baltimore. Ali moved first and quickly settled into her new home, often inviting Marcelo to come out with her and her friends. Before long, their sustained friendship from childhood blossomed into an even deeper bond, and Marcelo took up Ali’s invitations to spend nights or weekends at her apartment whenever he could. This included several “friend dates,” where the two of them would go out to dinner or spend hours laughing together in her apartment.

Close to the start of 2020, just before the coronavirus pandemic broke out in Maryland, Marcelo decided to shoot his shot. He asked Ali — his old friend who could always make him smile and match his level of weird — if she wanted to go out to dinner. He asked in a slightly different tone than they would typically use to arrange their “friend dates,” and Ali, fearing that she would lose her bestie, politely told him she wasn’t interested. As the pandemic grew more serious, both spent more time in Pikesville and stayed in touch, sometimes meeting each other for walks or quick visits downtown. Marcelo kept some hope alive.

In 2021, Marcelo bought his first house in Federal Hill and moved to the city. That summer, Ali, in the process of figuring out whether or not to renew her lease in the neighborhood, told a friend that she couldn’t imagine moving far from Marcelo and wanted to stay close to him. They went out with friends in mid-July, and she remarked to the group that she and Marcelo had made a “marriage pact” a few years earlier: that they would marry each other if neither found love by age 30. People couldn’t help but notice that the chemistry between the two lifelong pals had shifted (and that they had chosen a curiously low cut-off age for the pact).

A week later, Ali joined Marcelo and a group of guy friends for a night out to celebrate his big purchase. After a raucous hour on the Baltimore “pirate ship,” they went to a bar for more drinks and some dancing. The rest of the group looked on with a mix of surprise and delight as Ali and Marcelo shared their first kiss.

By this point, Marcelo was all in – he had even invited Ali out to dinner with his parents and sister a few weeks prior – but Ali needed a few more days to process that their friendship had changed. They spent a week without talking, which Ali remembers now as a seminal moment in her life: She learned that she couldn’t stand silence or distance from her best friend in the world. She was all in, too.

In the end, Ali was first to tell Marcelo that she loved him – about a month after they said they would give their romantic relationship a real try – and neither of them ever looked back. He proposed at the top of Federal Hill Park in November 2023, in full view of the city where they fell in love.

A boy and a girl, standing side-by-side, in the grass. No clouds to be seen. The brightest of suns.