We sat next to each other on a flight from London to Amsterdam after our annual pilgrimage to the CogSci conference, both covertly noting the other. But we didn't talk the whole flight, until Alex asked George for help reaching her poster tube, an obvious CogSci tell. From there, we excitedly pieced together a picture of our strangely parallel lives: we had moved to the same obscure Dutch town, worked at the same university, attended the same conferences, won the same prize, and even lived in the same building. From all of this it seemed pretty clear that we should consider joining forces, or at least pooling some errands, but we played it as cool as two people can while talking a mile a minute. After a 2-hour train ride that auspiciously took 3 hours (George was navigating), we finally parted ways on campus, with a funny farewell from George, "Don't forget me!" Weeks later, after a few tellingly unproductive "lunch meetings" and "writing sessions" together and some much-needed encouragement from friends, Alex went to George's talk--where she was the only attendee not involved in his (successful!) career advancement decision--and asked him out. Alex likes to think that she's doing particularly well on the not forgetting front.

Our first getaway together, a few months after we met, was to Paris, where we danced in the snow, walked along the Seine in the small hours of the morning, and first told each other we were in love. (We did not attach a lock to a bridge, but we discovered a fallen key and managed to find its lock among the hundreds...) We went back whenever we could, and after moving to Stanford, jumped when we heard of an upcoming conference in Paris. George knew he had to act fast, so he enlisted the best help around for picking out a ring, Alex. His only options to retake the element of surprise were 1) to do the proposal on the flight out (see above), or 2) to do daily fake-outs with untied shoes, but then actually spring the ring on one of these (and not on the last day). Planes being somewhat unromantic, George went for the second option. After a few days of conferencing and sightseeing, he planned his day: Musee d'Orsee and then a walk along the Seine to the Louvre courtyard, where we had shared a moment in the moonlight on our first trip to Paris, followed by an excellent dinner and a candlelit choir concert at Notre Dame. All went smoothly (although Alex noted a particular spring in George's step) until we found the Louvre courtyard overrun with fashion models, at which point George was forced to regroup and fall back to the banks of the Seine--Alex's favorite part of the city--where we got engaged. Incidentally, the dinner was so excellent that we lingered and missed the choir at Notre Dame, which burned much of the way down shortly afterward, greatly prolonging our date. We're very much looking forward to finishing it someday.