I had a few jobs while I was in grad school at SMU, one of which was at the Graduate Student Center. During one of my shifts, I was chatting with my boss Christa and she mentioned I should connect with a guy named William Eigenbrodt. According to Christa, William was very kind, respectful, and hard working and we could be great friends. Perhaps she knew something I didn’t. Flash forward to November of 2021. I received an email inviting all international students to a free Thanksgiving dinner. I invited everyone I could think of because who would not want a FREE dinner?! However, the only ones who said yes were Jackie (my roommate at the time), her (then) fiancé Brent, and this “William”. While we were at the dinner, I couldn’t help but notice that William was such a gentleman. He held onto my coat so I could get a second dessert plate, got everyone drinks, etc etc. I started to think that Christa might have been right. After dinner, we met up with some of Jackie and Brent’s friends at a rooftop bar in Lower Greenville called HG Supply. I had the best time and couldn’t stop thinking about how much fun I was having with William there. From that night on, I would not stop talking to Jackie about William. William this, William that. At some point, Jackie took charge and typed a message for me addressed to William which basically said that I liked him and that I wanted to see if this could go anywhere. After I tweaked the message to sound a little more like me, Jackie did the honors and hit send. I’m not going to lie, I was SO nervous!! This was the boldest thing I had ever done! After what felt like hours, William responded with something like: sure, how about after finals? (I think he was playing it cool). I was going to fly to the Netherlands immediately after finals, so that wasn’t going to work for me. I (not Jackie) responded, how about next Wednesday? Before I knew it, William had sent me an Open Table reservation for two at the Smoky Rose at 7PM on Wednesday.

I first met Romée as a classmate during SMU’s MSA program that I was a part of from August 2021 till May 2022. Around early November I invited all (or so I thought) the international students to my family’s Thanksgiving celebration as they had never experienced an American Thanksgiving before. I didn’t think to invite Romée because I didn’t know she was an international student since she speaks English like she grew up in suburban America. After hearing about my nice gesture, she invited me to the Thanksgiving meal hosted for SMU international students about a week later. She had invited a lot of people, but fate had it that I was the only one to show up from our program. After going to the Thanksgiving event, we went out to HG Supply in Lower Greenville and I saw how much fun Romée was to be around outside of the classroom. I later got a text from Romée asking if I wanted to go out, and while I initially wanted to wait until after Finals, I realized that was a terrible reason to postpone a date. We went out to dinner at the Smoky Rose that week. I felt about halfway into the date that I wanted Romée to be my girlfriend and kept asking her out over the next two weeks, finals or not. We quickly became boyfriend/girlfriend in December of 2021 and have been pretty much inseparable ever since.

Thank you Julia for making all the art on our website, we love you!