Yale Love and Friendship Stories

I met my husband Nick ’22 during our first-semester of freshman year at Yale during a club meeting. With many snowy walks across campus between Branford and Silliman (our respective colleges) and long dining hall meals, our love blossomed, and we became inseparable during our 4 years at Yale. We are now celebrating our two year wedding anniversary in May! Yale led me to meet my best friend and partner for life, and for that I am forever grateful! 

It was October of 1955 when I was president of the Yale Forestry Student's Association and my duties included greeting all visitors to the School at Sage Hall. Our first visitors were two senior students from Vassar College in up-state New York, researching for a thesis proposing that students work in National Parks with all found and no salary. They were Elizabeth Cushman from New York and Martha Hayne from San Francisco. Martha and I fell in love and visited all over the country for three years before marrying our respective spouses. Last week her sons lined up a sweet Valentines call for us two now single parents in our 90's, Martha in New Hampshire and me in Vancouver Canada. "Imagine!" February 14, 2025. 

(Their thesis as welcomed by National Parks and 62,500 students benefitted. Elizabeth received the highest civilian award from President Obama.) 

Spring 1992 I’d just signed-in at the Beinecke, where I was researching for an essay for Geoffrey Hartman’s class when a research assistant, Nancy LeRoy, introduced herself, “Excuse me, aren’t you Andrew Anker?” She reminded me that we’d met in 1976 at a film show in NYC. It turned out we were both graduate students! Our first date was on Valentines Day at Willoughbys. We married in 1994, our son was born in 1995, and we lived in California for 25 years. Though very happy on the West Coast, we missed New Haven and Yale. Two years ago, we found a lovely home in North Haven. Now that we’re retired, we have plenty of time to enjoy so many of the wonderful concerts, film shows, sports events, and art exhibitions; our neighbors and community are friendly and welcoming. 

My Stubborn Bernie:

We first met at the YSE community day. I can’t say it was one of those moments where you just know someone will be important in your life - it was more like an argument waiting to happen. As it turned out to be exactly what our friendship would be built on. 

He is stubborn, hardheaded, and impossible to convince of anything. If I say the sky is blue, he’d find a way to argue that it wasn’t. Yet he still followed me on my decisions. He calls me old woman, a running joke between us because I always reminded him that I was older. And in return, he was Bernie or father Bernard, the one who never hesitated to challenge me - whether about my opinions, choices or even how I made tea. 

However, he was always there when it matters. On the days I didn’t show up to class, he would call to ask “Where are you?,” if I missed an event, I would get a text: “What is your excuse this time, old woman?” He noticed my absence when no one else did. And when I was sick or just overwhelmed, he checked in not with dramatic concern, but in his usual, stubborn way, making sure I knew I wasn’t invisible.

In Summer 2023, we traveled together for a fieldwork in his country, navigating long days of research, cultural differences, and off course, more arguments. He never agreed with my plans, but still comes along for a ride. Somewhere between the debates, the teasing, and the shared exhaustion, he became more than a friend. Friendship isn’t always about agreeing. Sometimes, it’s about the people who challenge you, frustrate you, call you out but also never let you fall. I’m glad that my journey to Yale brought me my friend, my annoying, stubborn, impossible to win against rock and a brother.

Happy Valentine’s Day to Bernard Nyanzu ’24 MF.

I met my husband Chiwang (David) Dong while we were both at Yale. He did Jook Songs and was an active member of CASA. I danced in the Phoenix dance troupe and joined CASA's lion dance team. We became good friends doing lion dancing. We started dating in my junior and his senior year. 25 years later, we're an "old" married couple and proud parents to 2 amazing boys. 

Floating along in my sophomore year with a gentleman C average and playing a non-dressing role on the hockey team, I was jolted awake when my dear friend, Tom Edwards, dislocated his shoulder at practice. We waited patiently for our wonderful team physician, Doc Kissick, to come put it back in. I was VERY frustrated that I could do nothing to help my friend. After reducing the shoulder with ease, Kissick turned to me and said, " Adams, you are pre-med, right? Why don't you go over to the medical school and talk with the Dean of Admissions." So I made an appointment and went over.

The Dean was most gracious and we talked for 45 minutes. On closing, he said, " Adams, you are a great kid, BUT you are not going to ANY medical school in the United States!" I was thunder struck and wandered all over downtown New Haven that night in the rain. I finally decided that the Dean was right; it was time for me to put the same effort that I was putting into sports into study. That Tuesday night as I cracked open my books, a friend came bye and said, "Let go to a movie." I retorted, " Naw, I think I'll book." "Well aren't you the greasy grind" "I guess so…"

Thus, began my first intellectual high in that the more I studied, the more excited I became…. And studied even more ! The next term still playing varsity lacrosse, I went from a 78 to a 93 average. I ended up getting into Harvard Medical School and eventually became a heart surgeon. All because Doc Kissick took the time to give me into much needed challenging push into reality.

In December of 1970 I was on a bus with the Yale Glee Club, a few other '71 Whiffs, and Yale women. Sitting a few rows behind me, on the aisle, was a very pretty woman with brown hair and intriguing eyes. Cherry Whitcomb '73 and I were married in October of 1971. Her parents forgave me for leading her from Yale to Michigan to finish her degree when they got grandchildren. Erica in '81 (Yale '03), Michael in '85 (Bowdoin '08, turned down Yale to be able to play hockey and sing which wasn't being done at Yale in the 21st century). Whether going to Yale or asking Cherry to marry me was my best decision is, as my lawyer friends would say "a moot point."

I met Joanne at Gibbs Lab in 1959. She was a secretary; I was a bursary student. I knew another gal from skating at Ingall’s Rink. Not wanting to miss the Junior Prom, I had to choose. I invited Joanne. It was our first date! We married in June 1962. Two kids, military service, and many adventures later, Joanne passed away in 2019, the day after her birthday, Valentine’s Day. We were in our 57th year of marriage. I still visit her mausoleum.

My father (Yale Med 1946) met my mother (Yale Nursing 1947) in New Haven. They married in 1948, settled in Florida, and raised eight children. My older son Jack graduated in 2004. Perhaps my grandchildren will be in the classes of 2043 and 2045!

I was a sophomore at Yale in 1984 when I decided to take German 125, which met 9 times a week, at 8:30 every day and at 11:30 M-Th. In the class I met a graduate student named Steve Silvia '91 PhD who was learning German to do his dissertation research in Political Science. That was the semester of the strike, of course, and our class was moved to the offices of the Yale Daily News on York Street. Since I was in JE, we would often encounter each when Steve would hang out in the Taft Library between classes. During the spring semester, we were supposed to pair up to practice conversation for an hour a week outside of class. Steve asked me to be his partner. We would go to Naples after the 8:30 class, speak German for an hour, and then just switch to English for the second hour before going back to class. At the end of the semester, he invited me to Sally's to celebrate a successful year of learning German. Before long, we were inseparable, and we have now been married for 35 years and have three wonderful sons. Thank you, German 125!

I met Jay Kobrin one Sunday afternoon at a Drama School party on York Street. I was in my third year, attending on the G.I. Bill, majoring in scenic, lighting, and costume design. Jay was in his first year majoring in costume design. Jay was then "assigned" to me as an advisee, we had dinner that evening, and spent the next 63 creative years together. I designed for many opera stages, and Jay created fashions. We were married on our 50th Anniversary.

While at Yale for grad school, I met so many wonderful friends with whom I've stayed close since graduating. I also met my husband there and we have two beautiful kids! Sending lots of love to Mona, Shawn, Danielle, Margaret, Michelle, Chun, and Steve!

I was blessed to meet the love of my life, my wife Dr. Patti Rose, early in the second semester of my senior year (January, 1984). Patti was in the first year of her two-year M.A. in Public Health program at Yale. We met at Toad's Place on night when we were both just hanging out with friends not looking to meet anyone. But she walked by me and I knew immediately that I had to meet her. I interrupted her game of Asteroids and asked if we could dance. She told me to meet her at her table after she finished. We danced and talked all night and we've been together ever since as we married on November 9, 1985! Our son also is a Yale College alum so Yale plays a huge part in our lives! 

Every Friday, we'd turn in our Directed Studies essays, go to the last lecture of the week, and then find a table in Timothy Dwight and talk through our readings, our next round of speeches for the Yale Political Union, our plans for the future. We called it "DS Lunch Club" and the dozen or so of us kept sharing that time all through freshman year. Come sophomore year shopping period, we were all back at the table in TD, making spreadsheets of our schedules and all endeavoring to keep that Friday lunch block clear. 

We kept DS lunch club going all the way till we graduated (with one of continuing to work through the DS readings he felt he hadn't given the time they deserved until at least a year *after* graduation). We keep a lively group chat going, we've been to each others weddings, and we're grateful to have found a third place that sustained us through Yale.

My husband, Sam Spaulding '13, and I were set up as freshman screw dates in January 2010! We went on early dates in the Silliman dining hall and Mamoun’s, took classes together in computer science (our shared major), art history, and American literature, and visited each other’s hometowns in California and North Carolina during spring breaks. 

After college, I spent a year on a Fulbright Fellowship in the Netherlands, while Sam moved to Boston to begin his Ph.D. at MIT studying human-robot interaction. A year later, I joined Sam in Boston, and began my own Ph.D. at MIT, studying climate science and sustainable agriculture. We moved in together in 2018, sharing a boisterous household with several Yale classmates and our sweet and sassy cat, Zephyr. Outside of our research, we spent time exploring the local restaurant scene, skiing and camping with friends, and riding our bikes all over Eastern New England – including to the top of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park, where we got engaged in 2020. 

After wrapping up our Ph.D.s in 2022, we got married on a very warm day in Carmel Valley, CA, in a ceremony officiated by Jordan Orosz ’13 and attended by many dear Yale friends. In 2023, we moved westward to San Francisco, where Sam joined Apple working on an AI-for-Education team, and I started a role at Google X, using geospatial data and machine learning to predict wildfire risk. We’ve loved exploring the broader Bay Area by foot and by bicycle! Yale remains a special part of our story, and we cherish our connections, experiences, and memories from our time there.

My partner, Manuela Nivia ’23 MPP, and I met at Yale in the fall of 2021. Though we had both attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for undergrad, our paths never crossed until an orientation gathering for Jackson Institute students at Christopher Martins in East Rock.

During our first year at Jackson, we became close friends, bonding over shared classes, Somos Arepas, and our mutual admiration for Serena Williams—including a trip to New York to watch her final U.S. Open. At the start of our second year, I finally asked her on a date to Noa by September in Bangkok. By our third date, she convinced me to rescue a lost dog we found on the street. I’m allergic, but I tried to play it cool—until I broke out in hives. We ultimately found the dog a forever home, and I found my forever person.

After graduating in 2023 as part of the Jackson School’s inaugural cohort, we moved to Washington, D.C., where we live today.

My husband, artist Howie Lee Weiss, ’78 MFA  and I overlapped at Yale by a year. I was pursuing my MM in piano performance. I ventured outside my discipline, enrolling in a drawing class at the art building. We might have seen each other on the stairwells there, or ridden the elevator together to the snack bar on the top floor, or sat next to each other while dining at Gag JR’s (now Dunkin Donuts). Or, closer to my headquarters - Stoeckal Hall and the now non-existent music Annex - we might have eaten pizza at the same time at the legendary Naples Pizza. But we never met.

I had zero drawing technique and was way out of my depth but my art professor, Richard Lytle, was tolerant, even gracious. He pinned my drawing of a brick wall and shrubbery up on the wall and told the class, “This is an example of a successful failure.” My other attempts (driftwood, a cityscape, a live model), were “A for effort” quality. But by semester’s end, I emerged with a bonafide portfolio.

Seven years passed. I was a free-lance pianist in the Boston area. Then I landed a full-time appointment – a “real” job, that is – as a music professor at Goucher College in Baltimore. Within weeks of relocating, I was in a bumpy, unstable relationship with a lawyer and posing simultaneously for an art professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, a contact given me by a mutual friend in Boston who, knowing my love of art, thought we’d enjoy one another’s company. While sitting for her, I poured out my woes: things were going badly with the lawyer. After several weeks of this, she put her paintbrush down and banged her fist on the table, shouting, “I’m sick of hearing about this. I’m fixing you up with Howie Lee Weiss – and you’re going to marry him!

For starters, she brought Howie to a solo recital I played at Goucher. He was lean, cool and sexy in a leather jacket, with soft dark hair that fell to his collar bone. I fell instantly in love. We are now thirty-seven years married and counting, sharing a lifelong commitment to art making and creativity and our connection to Yale.

We usually stay overnight in New Haven en route to Boston, where our son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren live. We pause at all the sites we frequented, mutually but separately: the eateries, the Yale library, the apartments we lived in, the library, the swimming pool, the coop, the music and art buildings. 

Regrettably, I disposed of my art portfolio before I knew Howie. A master teacher, dazzling artist, and the nicest man on earth who happens to love and understand me completely, I’m certain he would have given it a kind and perceptive critique.

I’m now a Professor Emerita. Howie is in his final year as a professor at MICA. As we were separately at Yale, we’ve remained, as a couple, artists to our core. 

We are the most improbable best friends. And we have been for nearly 36 years. Amy Gambrill ’93 is tall, elegant, athletic, sweet-tempered, energetic, scientific, game-loving, capable. I am none of those things. We were first-year suitemates in Farnam. Otherwise, we might never have really met because she spent her time organizing recycling and out in the woods (she was a geology and environmental studies double major). She also threw herself into an array of varsity and intramural sports. She went to Australia with the lacrosse team after our first year, and she bungee jumped while there. In college, I mostly skulked in libraries and squash court theaters, a history major and caffeine addict who did a lot of theatrical directing. Drunken and confused cheering at The Game was pretty much the full extent of my athletic activity. She got up for breakfast before her 9am classes on Science Hill. I only went to breakfast when I had stayed up all night, never taking a class before 10:30. Her grapefruit at brunch in the JE Dining Hall occasionally squirted me in the eye, as I put away yet another Diet Coke. Still, an intense whispered hours-long conversation in an overheated L&B room—where we discovered that we had more in common than we had first realized—confirmed our friendship in December 1989. Later that year, we confounded suitemates by playing Pictionary so successfully. As our opponents fumbled, I drew a quick hexagon with a dot in it, and she hollered: “Paris.” We won. In other words, she gets me. When we graduated in 1993, she went to Morocco with the Peace Corps. I went to England to study history at Cambridge. The internet was only just starting, and neither of us even had landline phones. We wrote letters on thin airmail paper for those two years. I still have the ones she sent me. Despite decades of moves and changes in our lives, we remain the closest of friends. We have stood by each other—metaphorically and occasionally literally—through graduations, marriages, houses, childbirths, divorces. Several months pregnant, she flew to Edinburgh to be the matron of honor at my wedding. I came home to my flat to find her wrestling a wedding gift of patio furniture on the stairs in the entryway there. I have cried with her on the phone in a parking lot in Chicago as the dusk drew in. I have eaten lobster with her in Maine. I have floated in an innertube with her down the Susquehanna River (guess whose idea that was). I have laughed and laughed with her, most recently at my birthday brunch in Baltimore, where we split an improbable Bloody Mary with a fried chicken garnish. We talk most weekends. We are godmothers to each other’s children. We never clean for each other. With luck, we will end up in the Home together so she can squirt all the grapefruit juice in my eye that she can muster. 

I started the 3-year MSN program at the Yale School of Nursing in 1975. At the same time, Fred Dettmer started the JD program at YLS. Two weeks after the semester began, we met over my room-mate's car which stalled outside a Yale building which turned out to be the law school. The guy who helped me push the car to a gas station will have been my husband for 45 years on June 21.

I met Charles Harrington Elster my sophomore year, but we didn't start dating till my junior year. I was living off campus with Steve Hayes, Lisa Wilner, Marisa Ramirez, and Anges Kolokoska. Charlie was putting together a reading of Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas and he and other folks in drama ( Wally Johnson) would rehearse in our apartment. That's how this group jelled as life-long friends. Charlie and I married in 1984, had 2 girls, and made our permanent home in San Diego, CA. Charlie was diagnosed with cancer in 2019 and passed away in 2023. My heart is broken, but as Tennyson wrote, Tis better to have loved and lost than not have loved at all.

My love story involves my parents. Both of my grandfathers, Frank N. Platt, and Irvin W. Sanford, were classmates, Class of 1898S. The Platts were natives of Milford, CT, while the Sanfords, having lived in various locations, settled in Columbus, Ohio. In the late 1920s the Sanfords moved back to Connecticut, Grandfather Sanford looked up Grandfather Platt, and that's how my parents met. 

My husband Dorian Rivers and I met through Yale’s a cappella community in 1994 during rush, when we were both promoting our groups at a frat party. He was the Business Manager of the Duke’s Men (now Doox), and I was the Rush Manager for Redhot & Blue (coed), so we always say we met "competing for men." We started dating soon after we met and married four years later. Now, our two sons both sing at Yale and are members of the Yale Alley Cats.