Otter Love
This is a sponsored post in paid partnership with Carmex.
In honor of Valentines Day, I thought I would get a little more personal than usual and talk about the other man behind The Modern Otter! My fiancé, Mike! He's my greatest support system and takes all of the photos for the blog! I literally could not do it without him. Thank you to Carmex for letting me share this origin story, and for making sure my lips are primed for Valentines Day kisses (and kisses every other day of the year). ;)
Mike and I met a little over seven years ago. We were both working for Banana Republic in different states and coincidentally moved to the city within a month of each another. We both transferred to the SoHo flagship store, but it took us a YEAR of working together before we even started speaking! He was on the customer experience side of the business, and I was on the visual and merchandising side. It was like a tale of two cities! I would get in at 6am everyday, so we barely ever saw each other. It took months, and a mutual friend to bridge the gap.
Flash forward to our first official date: Mike casually asked (via a Facebook wall post) if I wanted to go to the Museum of Modern Art on our day off. After hours of wandering around MoMa, we didn't want the date to end, so we went for drinks... which turned into dinner... which turned into us buying tickets to the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center!
Mike has a degree in Opera and mine is in Theatre, so it seemed like a perfect activity. We ended up drinking way too much champagne in the upper balcony and I spent most of the show complaining about the fact that there was a live horse on stage. Opera singers tend to stand still when they sing, so when a large animal is the only moving object on stage during a 10 minute aria, it's super distracting!!
The horse was completely out of place, but we had an amazing time together.
Looking back, it sounds like such a ridiculously bougie first date. We went to the museum and the Opera! Like, who does that?!
But it was absolutely a night to remember and could not have been more perfect. A few years into our relationship, I started drawing sketches of iconic places we had gone on dates. We have a collection of them now in the apt, including MoMa and Lincoln Center. I'm hoping to draw more as we grow old together!
Long before I started working with Carmex on this post, I was an avid user of their lip balm! It's really the only thing that saves my lips during the harsh New York winters. Healthy skin and healthy lips are so important and so hard to maintain. They have everything from sticks, to the Classic Lip Balm in a Jar that has been around for over 80 years. I use the Carmex Daily Care Lip Balm in the wintergreen flavor (it's Mike's favorite too) cuz it's easy to put on, but the Strawberry would make for a super sweet Valentines Day kiss!
Lincoln Center is still one of our favorite places in the city, so it was great to return to where it all started for this shoot! HUGE thank you to Nathaniel James for capturing the moment for us.
We're in the middle of planning our wedding, so expect to see a lot more 'behind the Otter' stories as we get closer to our big day!
And Happy Valentines Day!!
