CLEVELAND — Their romance began with a tweet. And thanks to Twitter, their engagement has gone viral.
On Saturday, my colleague and friend Ben Axelrod proposed to his girlfriend Torey Stachowicz on the observation deck of the Terminal Tower.
Let's not bury the lead on this: She said YES!!!
"I wound up buying these tickets to go to the top of the Terminal Tower through our apartment complex," Ben explained. "I thought if this is a cool view, this would be where I'd want to do it since we're both very passionate about Cleveland."
Sounds great, right?
When Ben made the official announcement on Twitter to his 23,000 + followers on Saturday night, he decided to link back to the very first tweet between the couple:
Rewind back to December of 2014, Torey reaches out to Ben with a unique request.
"I didn't get that tweet until I woke up at about 6:00 a.m. the next morning," Ben recalls. "I wake up to this alert. Understand I don't get tweets like this one very often! So I responded in kind and we had a back and forth."
Let the record reflect that when the couple had their first date at Dublin's Pint Room, Ben picked up the check.
As word of Ben and Torey's engagement spread on social media on Saturday, the story was picked up by ESPN Sports Business Reporter Darren Rovell.
"By Sunday morning, the story had started to get a little more traction," says Ben. "There was a 'Twitter Moments' documenting our past tweets to each other. "On Monday, it really started to pick up as the story was being aggregated into blogs, websites, wedding websites, Barstool Sports, and so on. It's the way we met, so I guess it's fitting."
Twitter works for Ben Axelrod. That applies to his professional career as well. When WKYC was looking for a digital producer in 2017, Ben stood out to our Director of Digital Content and Strategy Denise Polverine, who followed him on Twitter. She asked him to come to Cleveland for an interview, and the rest, as they say, is history.