The Story Behind "Married to A Disney Addict"

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Hi Everyone,

We're so excited to get started here at Married to A Disney Addict and can't wait to see where this goes, but we figured what better place to start than the beginning. We really want this to feel like a family community and the best way we can think of helping to create that sort of feeling is dedicating our first blog post to the story of us so you can all get to know us a little better (and we hope you all will follow along too in our Forum to introduce yourselves)!

My name is Matt. I was born and raised on the Jersey shore to a large Italian family (yes, we all met at Grandma's every Sunday for dinner). Growing up, my family was never that into traveling, we'd visit a few places once in a while, but we tended to just go to the beach. My parents did take us to Disney World twice growing up and we found it fun, but honestly it never really was our "thing." Meanwhile, in northern NJ, Krystle was living the opposite life...the DISNEY life. Her parents and younger brother frequently visited Disney and it dominated their travel expereince. I imagine her childhood bedroom filled with stuffed Disney dolls, posters of her favorite Disney movie on the walls, and Mickey Ears everywhere (she confirms this was basically true).

In September of 2007, Krystle and I met at a concert while attending Kean University. We quickly fell for each other and before we knew it, we were dating. Krystle quickly began talking about how much she loved Disney, but that her family hadn't been in a couple years. That's when I knew what to do. I visited a travel agent and booked a Disney vacation for our 1 year anniversary. She cried when I told here we were going and seeing just how happy she was in Disney made me start to grow to love the magic of WDW.

It was obvious that she was the one and before I knew it I had an engagement ring stored in a safe at my parents house. She had always told me of ther dream of getting engaged in Disney with her family, so I knew I had to wait a little while to make that dream come true. The trip finally arrived in the Summer of 2009 and I'll just say, while riding Tower of Terror with the most expensive thing you have ever purchased in your pocket is a little nerve racking, seeing her face as I proposed in front of the castle was the best day of my life (until we got married...and then had Lincoln...). Our wedding, while not overboard, was definitley Disney inspired (we had Fast Pass tickets as the table numbers and a Mickey ears cake topper to name a few) and of course we had to honeymoon at WDW (although she did let me take her to Aruba a couple months later).

Ever since our first year anniversary and first trip to WDW together, we have been fortunate enough to go almost at least once a year. We may have missed one or two (especially last year due to the pandemic), but we also threw in a couple multi-trip years to make up for it lol. We have occassionally gone just the two (three) of us, but we mostly travel with Krystle's family who purchased Disney Vaction Club (DVC) shortly after we met. Up until this point though, Disney was still definetly Krystle's "thing" as I mostly enjoyed going becuase of how happy it made her.

About 5 years ago I started an Instagram account called "married to a disney addict" as a bit of a joke to both document our Disney adventures and to share my "pain" as Krystle dragged me to another visit to hot and humid Florida and the Mouse House. It was fun to intereact with others who also had a significant other who was more into Disney than they were, but we all seemed to share 2 things in common. 1) We loved how much our partners loved Disney and 2) we all seemed to be turning into bigger and bigger Disney fans ourselves (why else would I have created a social media account basically dedicated to it)?

While we still refer to Krystle as the "OG Disney addict," the truth is I started giving her a run for her money about 3 years ago. Not only was I simply enjoying Disney more myself, but on May 20, 2017, our son Lincoln was born. I had always said that I wanted to wait until our kids were about 5 until we brought them to WDW...Lincoln went for the first time at 15 months (well technically the baby bump went too), and then 3 more times within a 1 year period! After seeing how he literaly ran to Mickey on his first trip and how much he loved being there (yes, even at just 15 months old), I knew I was stuck. I would never, not love Disney. On his very first trip, we bought into DVC for ourselves to ensure we could always bring him back. I started to enjoy Disney more and more for myself and well, now here we are... both of us able to say that we are "Married to a Disney Addict."

- Matt