Most of us don’t remember the pandemic as an exciting or particularly joyful time. Instead, we remember being confined to our homes far longer than we ever would have liked. Yet somehow, the way we remember that time marks the beginning of our love story. Rewind to the spring of 2020 at USC. Grant was a junior and Maya a sophomore, both enrolled in the same physics class. However, Maya’s first sighting of Grant wasn’t in the classroom. For over a year, she had occasionally spotted him at the USC gym and quietly developed a crush from afar. Naturally, she did absolutely nothing about it. That changed when a mutual friend introduced them during physics class. Maya quickly realized she had the perfect excuse to get to know Grant better: she could offer to tutor this struggling physics student—purely as one classmate helping another, of course. What Maya imagined would be the ideal opportunity to spend time with Grant was suddenly interrupted when USC sent students home as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. After classes moved online, Maya reached out and offered to continue tutoring virtually. Before long, the “tutoring” Zoom sessions began lasting longer and longer, as the two spent hours getting to know one another from behind their computer screens. After six months of Zoom calls, they finally went on their first date in Manhattan Beach. And, as the story goes, the rest is history. Whether Grant learned much physics from those tutoring sessions is still unclear, but he did walk away with his future wife—so we’d say he got the better end of the deal.