We met when we were both graduate students at UCLA (on 6/21, the day before Maggie's birthday). With Maggie heading off to a conference immediately after our second date we started out long-distance, but that ended up being just the right recipe to get to know each other. It seemed like we were fated to be long-distance once more when we both left LA at the same time. Maggie moved to Chicago to pursue further study in linguistic anthropology, I moved to New York for work; we were going to have to deal with that distance until one of us was done with our commitments. As for many of us, the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything: a year ago, when Columbia announced that it was moving online, I packed my bags and was on a plane to Chicago the next day, and that was that: no more long-distance. We've been living together ever since (having moved back to NYC in August), and we're excited to see where the next steps take us.