Our Story

I wrote this piece with the help of Alex for our videographer, William Gaff at Humanstory. I thought I'd post it here as well.

Our story -

Amy and Alex met in the fall of 2002 in the first days of graduate school at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California. They were classmates and friends, but they both led independent lives and dated other people. They would run into each other on campus and see each other at parties where Alex always noticed how Amy lit up the room. Both were good friends with Jesse, who was Alex's house mate through most of graduate school and who was on Amy's running team during that same time. Through invitations from Jesse, they have fond memories of running on five-person relays together and going to see shows together with their mutual friends.

In the spring of 2007, Amy and Alex saw each other at the annual Caltech Dance Show. Amy was there with her co-workers, and she invited Alex to sit with them since he was there by himself. There weren't enough seats for everyone to sit together, so Amy and Alex sat by themselves one row in front of the rest of her co-workers. While chatting, Amy noticed that she thought the wrinkles around Alex's eyes were really cute. She caught herself because it wasn't something she normally noticed. She realized right then that she in fact had a crush on Alex. They continued talking of surfing and South Africa (a trip Amy was planning to visit her friend Melanie and her husband David), but then went their separate ways after the dance show. The next day Alex sent Amy an email, which was the first email she'd ever received from him that wasn't a party invitation or about some group event. It was the day before he was leaving for six weeks in Israel. She wrote him back, hoping that his email to her was a sign that maybe he had also noticed something the night before, but then she didn't hear from him again. She figured that he was really busy working in Israel, but her crush did start to fade over those weeks. Then, they ran into each other on campus just minutes after Alex got back to Caltech after his trip. They talked for a long time, and her crush was renewed. Much of the same pattern continued over that summer. Amy and Alex would have a nice conversation or a fun day at the beach, and then they'd go for weeks without running into each other. Though Amy thought she was getting a good vibe from Alex, she never wanted to say anything to him since they had many of the same friends and she didn't want to make things awkward for anyone if Alex didn't feel the same way.

This whole time Alex was thinking about Amy, too, although they both seemed skittish about acknowledging it. He kept telling himself that since Amy was someone really special he had better get things right. He wanted to make sure that getting to know each other got the full attention it deserved. Then travel for work or a lot of late night experiments would come up and they wouldn't see each other for a few weeks.

Months into the crush, Amy's friend finally got tired of hearing about Alex. She sent Alex a text message from Amy's phone that said, "LetsMAKE out." Amy was embarrassed and thought her secret was out, but Alex interpreted it as one of her students (Amy was an resident associate at the time and lived with 70 Caltech undergrads) texting the first person in her phone's contact list. That text did lead Amy to be slightly more proactive in letting Alex know she had a crush, and Alex did seem to pick up on the hints (he showed up with chocolates and a postcard after his trip to Germany in August), but another month went by before their first date.

Finally, in September of 2007 the stars aligned, and they made a date to watch "Little Miss Sunshine" together. At the end of that date, they both new that there was something really special about the relationship. They found that they could talk endlessly about lots of different topics and that, despite growing up in different regions of the country, they had a lot in common.

Amy was nervous about introducing Alex to her kids, since she'd heard stories of how the students grilled past RA's dates. Fortunately, the students loved Alex, and he loved them.

Within months they were traveling to South Africa together, and they were meeting each other's parents and college friends at weddings all across the country. In the summer of 2008, Alex was even brave enough to spend a week in a van traveling across Montana with all of Amy's immediate family.

In the fall of 2008, just a little over a year after starting to date, Amy finished her PhD, moved up to the Bay Area, and they began a long distance relationship. Over the next few months, Alex also secured a job up in the Bay Area, but one which he wouldn't start until the end of his PhD in the fall of 2009. During that year of distance, Amy and Alex saw each other as much as possible, traveling back and forth up the California coast, running in a 200-mile relay with their friends, and also taking bigger trips together to Tasmania, Seattle, and Yosemite. Amy shared new friends as she made them and tried to integrate Alex into her new life as much as was possible with the distance. Meanwhile Amy continued to support Alex during the trying last months of graduate school. In August of 2009, while still living over 300 miles apart, Alex proposed and secured their future together.

Alex moved up to the Bay Area in December of 2009, and much of Amy and Alex's months living back in the same area have been spent tackling wedding to-dos and running in races together. Now they're looking forward to getting married and being married, to running more races and planning more vacations, and to growing old together.