Castleton University, fall semester, 2018.

Nothing unites two people more than? You guessed it, politics. We met by chance, assigned to the same semester-long test group in a class called U.S. Campaigns and Elections. Lyndsey first noticed Tyler, a laid back beanie-wearing nerd parked permanently in the back of the classroom, when he made a public statement criticizing libertarians. Lyndsey, a libertarian, distinctly remembers rolling her eyes, and cursing her fate of attending college in the political/social scape of Vermont, which was not her original plan.

Tyler was somehow even more reserved and awkward around people at that time, but he noticed Lyndsey, and always thought she was a very interesting person with something dark and funny to say. He especially noticed everything she said in her “valley girl” accent, and her crazy Dunkin’ orders. Outside of one long conversation walking to the parking lot after being berated by a classmate, we didn’t talk at all outside of class.

Fast forward to 2020, COVID has shut down the schools and Lyndsey is looking for some guidance putting together a scope for her necrogeography project for the McNair Scholars Program. If not for the fact that Tyler’s last name was one of the first alphabetically on all the McNair Scholars email chains, Lyndsey would not have even known he was a senior member of the McNair Scholars Program because he did not show up to any of the program meetings. Lyndsey sends him a message on Facebook asking him if he is actually a McNair scholar, and to her surprise, he says yes.

During this time, the McNair directors had the idea to start weekly Zoom check-in calls that they referred to as “McNair-eas” that McNair students could utilize to talk about their research or grad school applications or just to bicker about anything. We used them more as a means to talk to each other and entertain the McNair staff by pulling off many elaborate joint pranks in the call. We would FaceTime each other all day, join the McNair-eas at the exact same time, and then FaceTime again after the call ended cackling about the pranks we’d pulled. After a couple months of our pranks, we finally spend time in person and go to the quarry hole behind Lake Bomoseen. Lyndsey liked Tyler’s company so much, when she was staying with her friends in Rutland during COVID, she would spend hours at Shaw’s watching Tyler put away produce. When she got back to the house, she had been accused of “liking that man so much she spent hours at a grocery store with him.” But she still denied having feelings for him for many months until she finally let him kiss her one night. We stayed up for hours enjoying each other's company that night, and the rest is history. We ended up being best friends who loved each other and traveled across the country twice together before finally making it official one evening in the desert of Escalante, Utah.