Journalist Chloe Angyal wrote a piece in Feministing ten years ago titled "Marry me, Zach Wahls." She reported on a 19-year-old's passionate defense of his same-sex marriage household to the Iowa House of Representatives— a three-minute speech so eloquent and powerful that it went viral and landed him on Ellen.
What she didn't know is that a decade later, she would marry Zach Wahls. She also didn't know that Zach Wahls would go on to become an Iowa state lawmaker himself.
If a romantic comedy meant to capture the cultural moment of the past decade was to be made, a producer wouldn't need to look further than Wahls' and Angyal's hall-of-fame-level meet-cute.
The Des Moines Register
In April 2013, the two met again, this time in New York City, where Angyal still lived and where Wahls was visiting for an event while campaigning to end discrimination by the Boy Scouts. Both were seeing other people at the time, but she reached out to him after seeing a press release for the event he was attending, and they got breakfast at a Cuban diner.
They stayed in touch. The next summer, Wahls began interning at the Obama White House. He and Angyal were now in the same time zone, the closest they'd ever physically lived, and their relationship began in earnest.
In the summer of 2018, after Wahls ran a successful primary campaign and received the nomination for Democratic state senate in Johnson County, Angyal left New York City and joined her boyfriend in Coralville. Wahls would go on to win the general election and become a state senator.
After nearly a year of living together, Wahls and Angyal were ready to take things to the next level. Though he got close to proposing at a very public birthday brunch recently, Wahls decided to save it for a more intimate moment, out of respect for Angyal's preference.
Last Thursday, at their home in Coralville, Wahls proposed over champagne and take-out pizza with a ring procured from Angyal's 105-year-old grandmother.
The Des Moines Register
