Through Video Screens

We fell in love with this talented and devoted couple last spring and were delighted when Briana sent in their love story - written by Kevin! Thank you, Kevin & Briana, for sharing your story:

It was January 2020. I was in my fourth year of medical school, running the gauntlet of a Sub-Internship. We met online, as everyone does these days. She responded to the last hopeful message that I had flung into the digital ether before my sixteenth planned retirement from online courtship. From the first, the conversation flowed like water: effortless, lucid and unselfconscious for hours on end. I stood in admiration of her worldliness. Destinations abroad that I had only read about, she had seen with her own eyes. She was a social worker whose varied career had made inroads with people of every imaginable age, background, and experience—and she had a lifetime of stories to show for it.

In February, she told me that while she was attending a hearing for foster care, a man hit on her on the steps of the courthouse. She told him that she was taken. I realized that, without consciously admitting it, I had come to think of myself the same way.

One weekend evening, I received an uncharacteristically cryptic message from her, stating that she had something to tell me. I called her immediately with no small amount of apprehension. She told me that she loved me, and I tearfully told her I felt the same. As invested as we were in each other’s lives, we had only seen each other through video screens. Our anticipated meeting was rolled back on multiple occasions in the face of our unforgiving schedules, and the onset of COVID-19 deferred it further still.

Match Day—when fourth-year medical students find out which residency training program they will join—was joyous, because I matched to a spot at her location. But the occasion also carried an unavoidable tinge of absence and disappointment. Absence of the long-awaited formal dinner and celebration that had been planned by the medical school to mark the next phase of our careers; absence of the friends I had made; and most of all, absence of the woman I loved. 

We united at last in June 2020—I bought a house sight unseen, which only truly became my home when she agreed to share it with me. One year later, we eloped, and with these bands renew our love for each other.