Aaron Cohen met Miriam Schneider on a blind date at a New York City restaurant in the spring of 2006. Earlier that day, Aaron’s grandmother had passed away, but he chose to keep the date. “She had been sick for a long time, and my family knew it was coming,” says Aaron, 30, a television sports writer and producer. “But we had the dinner scheduled, and the last thing—literally—my grandmother had said to me was to go find a nice Jewish girl and get married. So I figured it wouldn’t be right to cancel.”

His grandmother might have had a premonition, because less than three years of dating later, Aaron was ready to pop the question to Miriam, 30, an attorney. “We had been talking about marriage, so I needed to find a way to catch her off guard,” he says. So he told her that a last-minute work event had come up—a cocktail party—and she should come.

Jodie Song and Rafal Tokicz’s love story began on a kickball field near the Washington Monument. In October 2006, they found themselves placed on the same team but didn’t get to know one another until Jodie accidentally left her T-shirt behind after one of the games.

As the team was walking to a bar for some after-game drinks, Jodie, 28, an IT analyst, realized she’d forgotten her shirt but decided she was too far away to go back for it. Just then, she saw her teammate Rafal holding an extra white shirt. “I figured it was someone’s from our team,” says Rafal, 28, a private trainer, “and because a few of us were going to the bar, I was going to ask the teammates there if it belonged to any of them.”

So Jodie approached Rafal to tell him it was probably hers. “After the initial conversation about the shirt,” she says, “I asked him if he was headed to the bar because I hadn’t seen him there after our games.” Rafal said he was going, and the two headed on to the bar with the rest of the team.

Julie Wean and Jeffrey Partridge love to travel. The book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die is a favorite at their Mount Airy home—one by one, they’re checking locations off the list.

In January 2008, they were on a cruise to the Caribbean, a yearly tradition with friends. After they’d been dating for almost two years, the thought crossed Julie’s mind that Jeffrey, better known to his friends as Opie, might propose. Despite a 13-year age difference, the pair, who met when Julie’s sister married Opie’s best friend, had hit it off right from the start.

But after formal night on the ship came and went with no proposal, Julie, 24, a contract specialist with the Naval Medical Logistics Command, assumed she was wrong. So when they were docked a few days later in St. Lucia, she was suspecting nothing. Julie and Opie, 37, a Maryland state trooper, spent the morning ziplining through the rain forest with their friends. Later on in the day, the group decided to hike up the side of a mountain to a scenic overlook where the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea collide.

Tiffany Richards arrived at the library at Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law at 4 AM on her first day of class. In order to reserve a study carrel for the semester, students had to be there at 6 AM to put their names on the list. Tiffany had picked out her spot the night before, and when she arrived at her carrel, Mike Kudravetz was sitting at the one next door.

“He kept looking over at me, and finally I introduced myself,” says Tiffany, 28. “He had a girlfriend, and I wasn’t looking for anyone, but I didn’t have any friends, so it was nice to meet someone.” Tiffany left some Jolly Ranchers on her desk and a Post-It note for Mike telling him to help himself to the candy. He left a note back: “Good call on the Jolly Ranchers.”

Tiffany and Mike, 29, said hi to each other as they passed on campus over the next two years. The summer between their second and third years of law school, Mike bumped into Tiffany as she was moving things into storage and offered to help. After the semester began again, Tiffany and Mike started seeing each other almost everywhere. “I’d be walking to the YMCA to teach swim lessons and he’d be on a random street,” Tiffany says. “I’d go down a stairwell that nobody ever used, and he’d be there. He was literally everywhere!” Tiffany felt a connection between them, but Mike hadn’t made a move. “As I was getting up the nerve to ask her out, she e-mailed me to ask if I would like to go out sometime,” Mike says. “I called her and made the date.”

When Katie Carr and Chris Payne arrived at a mutual friend’s house to watch a football game on a September day in 2006, he knew they were being set up. She didn’t. “Hence the lack of makeup and shower,” says Katie, 28, a public-relations consultant. “I thought Chris was cute, and I was especially drawn to his blue eyes and witty banter. But I had no idea he was single and didn’t know he was interested in me until he invited himself out to dinner with my friends and me.”

Well Chris was interested, and he was completely hooked after Katie gave the waiter her dinner order: red meat. “Not a vegetarian—awesome!” thought Chris, 29, a graphic designer. “Is that steak she ordered medium-rare? Wow.” He didn’t ask for her number that night, but he did successfully stalk her on the Internet, Katie says, finding her e-mail address and contacting her the next day.

Fast-forward two years of dating bliss, and Chris wanted to make sure this one didn’t slip away: “I spent a lot of money on a handmade ring, slept with it under my pillow the night I got it, and bit my nails the entire next morning. I couldn’t wait to get the proposal over with and start celebrating.”

Julie Gorinson met Aaron Brand in 2002 at a DC bar where her sorority and his fraternity were hosting a party together. A mutual friend introduced them, and by the end of the night, Aaron, then a senior at the University of Maryland, asked Julie, a sophomore, for her number. “I wowed her with my dance moves and pickup lines, and that was the beginning of it,” says Aaron, 27, a law student at American University.

Aaron called Julie a few days later, and they went on their first date to a bar in College Park. “We spent a good chunk of the night playing Pacman,” he says. “I let her beat me, hoping that would make her more friendly toward me. It worked.”

The two dated through the year, and after Aaron graduated, he headed to Philadelphia for a year to work on a political campaign and she went to study abroad in Madrid. “We did the long-distance thing for a while before Aaron was offered a job on the Hill working as a legislative aide, and he came back to DC—to his true love, me, and politics,” says Julie, 25, a third-grade teacher in Potomac.

After catching an early-morning Southwest Airlines flight to Tampa, all La Tosha Lewis wanted to do was catch some shut eye. But as she tried to drift back to sleep, her boyfriend, Aleksandr Plavnik, wouldn’t let her. “He kept bothering me and waking me up,” says La Tosha, 34. So she told Aleksandr, 32, that if he was going to keep her up, he needed to entertain her.

Little did La Tosha know she was in for the show of her life.

While she had dozed off at the beginning of the flight, Aleksandr sneaked out of his seat to tell the flight attendants about the in-flight proposal plan he had hatched. La Tosha, an education lobbyist, and Aleksandr, an architect, were headed to Tampa, her hometown, for a friend’s wedding. “I was looking all over the Internet for different places and ways to propose,” he says. “Then my mom suggested that I do it at the very beginning of the trip on the plane, and as a bonus, those over-seat lights will make this ring sparkle very nicely. I knew it would set the tone for the whole vacation.”