Emily & Stephen
Emily & Stephen
Our Story
Our Story
Emily and I were born a day apart: May 17th and 18th of 1992.
We met at age 12, when we were seated next to each other in Ms. Tubbs' Honors English class…although it wasn’t until early high school that anything which could be called a friendship would develop between us. Most of our early interactions involved me asking to borrow a pencil—a trend that continued into the following year, when Mrs. Smith’s seating chart once again placed her in that unfortunate spot next to me.
A year later, and we were part of the same group of friends—a social circle coalescing around a shared love of words and music, the nucleus of which had formed in those English classes the years before. So, in early mornings spent loitering in the halls of our high school before classes started, I developed a crush. She was witty, and had style, and seemed to broaden the horizons of any conversation she was a part of, delivering articulate, thoughtful, passionate opinions on things I had never given a second thought before.
That admiration, and our friendship, grew over the following years—over lunches, unstudious study halls, basement hangouts, after-school rehearsals. In seventh grade, we were both understudies in The Sound of Music. Senior year, we played the King and Queen of Hearts opposite each other in the spring production of Alice in Wonderland. You couldn’t make it up!
Then college came, and we went our separate ways—me to Indiana University in Bloomington, and Emily to Loyola in Chicago. But no matter the distance, we stayed in touch. The internet made it easy for the friends we’d made in high school to stay friends. It was while we were catching up on a skype call during her semester studying abroad in London that I think something finally clicked for both of us.
When she returned, we got together seriously for the first time: a first try at the relationship that would eventually become a defining force in our lives. But she was still in Chicago, and I was still in Indiana, and distance is difficult at any age—not least in college. We broke up, but our friendship remained.
A few years later, our respective jobs found us both in the DC area. Before long, the warm embers of our friendship reignited, and we were back together. It was a turbulent time in both of our lives—but in navigating it together, we discovered the power and joy of being with someone who’s known you for your entire adult life. We were one another’s constant reminders of who we had been, who we were, and who we wanted to be.
So when Emily got into Harvard for a Master’s in Education, I was ecstatic with pride. We moved her up to Somerville, and I went back to DC—but a few months in, on a late-night phonecall, she convinced me: Move up here with me. She had gone to chase her dreams, and pointed out that—since I was nursing aspirations of getting out of physics and into biology—it would be the perfect place for me to do the same.
And she was right! I would never have had the courage to make the move on my own, but her faith and support made it possible. Before long I had caught that dream, and settled into a job at a microbiome-science startup as we settled into living together.
That was a dream all its own: we found joy in cooking for each other, going down Wikipedia rabbit-holes together, reading aloud to each other on long drives, taking trips to the wilds of New England with friends—and sometimes farther afield, to see our high school friends again each Thanksgiving.
COVID came, bringing challenges for us as for everyone, but the pandemic also brought opportunities—and here Emily caught her dream, too: she was hired on as one of the first employees at an education startup, where she’s spent the past few years designing and building a revolutionary new kind of school.
Those dreams have propelled us further than we’d ever have imagined—first to Israel, in the summer of 2023, and then to Switzerland, where we’ll be living until this coming September. And after that? Even we don’t know where this story goes next…but we’re excited to find out together.
