Clear Cut Couples: Jake and Alyona

Alyona and Jake’s love story starts at work -- well, it wasn’t a love story at first! Alyona was a journalist/on-air host for HuffPost Live and Jake was a broadcast engineer hired by AOL to cover HuffPost and its' studios. Jake knew Alyona was special, but his co-workers said she was out of his league. About six months after Jake started working for AOL, he finally saw his chance. Alyona was headed to Sochi to cover the Olympics and she needed someone to give her a lesson in setting up a simple camera shot so she could do updates from abroad. Jake jumped at the opportunity. This was his chance to finally meet face-to-face under some sort of "professional" context. Jake thinks it went really well, but it took about another year for the two to officially go out for drinks! The first date did go well, according to both of them. They’ve been together for nearly four years since.

Originally, Jake planned to propose on the beach in Puerto Rico. It was going to be romantic: beach, dinner, candlelight etc… but it turned out their tickets to Puerto Rico were the same weekend as Hurricane Maria. His Puerto Rico proposal plan wasn’t going to work! Alyona’s parents helped Jake come up with a new plan. They booked tickets and a family weekend for all of them to be together in Palm Springs. Palm Springs was a little different because of the family vibe, and convincing Alyona to go out alone with Jake was tough -- she wanted to spend time with her family since it was a family vacation. Jake decided that the Palm Springs Tramway would the place to propose. The tram lands at the top of the San Jacinto mountain range and has spectacular views of the valley below, it’s more ski resort chic than romantic -- but he knew it was going to be perfect. Jake had to come up with some weird excuses about why they should go to the tramway alone. Eventually she agreed.