John will tell you that he met Molly for the first time on September 25, 2016 — during a group study session in their freshman year dorm hall at the University of Minnesota, where Molly was leveraging her mom's homemade pumpkin bread to make friends. Molly will tell you that she has no memory of meeting John at this study session. Instead, her first memory of John is in a different study room, where their hall of friends threw him a small birthday party on September 28.

It was a little over a year later, in October 2017, that John and Molly put their (by then long-suffering) friends out of their misery and began dating in earnest. It's since been said that they owe their relationship to two separate friends (see: Matt and Aaron, groomsmen) for two different reasons, Molly's mom's pumpkin bread, John's birthday, a Guthrie theater production of Romeo and Juliet, the Dinkytown Five Guys, and even fate... depending on who you ask.