Love is in the Air

By Jane Muhlstein

Despite the common complaint that no one dates at Santa Clara, many campus couples are enjoying the various stages of their relationships. From blossoming romances to lasting commitments, the Santa Clara campus has it all.

Economics professor Michael Kevane first met his wife as an undergraduate at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. His wife Leslie Gray is now a professor in both the environmental studies and political science departments.

On a spring day in 1983, they both attended a senior social event on campus. "It was a week before I graduated," Kevane said. "If we hadn't met then, we never would have met. I gave her a ride home on my moped and we crashed."

Fortunately, their relationship progressed more smoothly than that ride home. When Gray graduated that December, she went to Egypt with Catholic Relief Services to work with refugees seeking asylum. Kevane joined her for the year as they traveled all over Egypt together. "It was very romantic," he said.

Gray and Kevane came to the Bay Area when they were both attending graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. They married in 1989 with an informal wedding that was "a party for our friends, not our parents," said Kevane. They left for the Sudan one month later, both with Fulbright Scholarships for their research.

Over the course of the last two decades, Gray and Kevane have spent years researching in the Middle East and Africa. Their last extended period abroad was in 1996 when the couple spent a year in Burkina Faso, a poor nation in West Africa.

Since their last excursion, Gray and Kevane have found new reasons to stay at home. In 1998, they welcomed their first child, Eliot. Three weeks ago, they brought home their second child, Suki.

"You acquire a new set of obligations," Kevane said of fatherhood. "Now we are constantly weighing our old obligations to our obligations to two young children."

While Gray and Kevane raise their family, senior Amanda Curry looks forward to starting one. Curry, a liberal studies major, just became engaged to Tim Shin, a recent Santa Clara graduate.

The pair met during the summer of 2001 when Curry's roommate introduced them. They have been dating ever since and, over Christmas break, decided to get married.

Curry says she realized Shin was "the one" while visiting his family in Hawaii over Christmas break. "That's when I realized that I wanted to start the rest of my life with him," she said.

"We knew pretty early on," said Curry. "I think the biggest thing was that when I thought of a future with him, I didn't think of everything as all wonderful. Of course, it will be wonderful, but there are always going to be hard things as well when you are married to someone, and I could see him going through the hard times with me."

This year, when the couple visited Shin's family in Maui for Christmas, he asked Curry to marry him.

Shin and Curry are busy making plans for the future. He is a middle-school pre-algebra teacher in San Jose and Curry is looking for a teaching job in the area. The two plan to marry sometime during the summer of 2004.

Although they plan to stay in the Bay Area for several years, Curry thinks that they will eventually move to Hawaii to start a family.

Their relationship has been so successful, Curry thinks, because they are both willing to overlook the small stuff. "The most important thing is to not get upset about the petty things," she said. "I see a lot of my friends getting mad over details. You're going to fight and you're going to have times when you don't want to be around each other. You just have to be willing to work through that."

Curry and Shin are focused on their future together, but freshmen Bently Taylor and Tony Guglielmi are savoring their time together at Santa Clara.

The couple began dating at the beginning of their senior year at St. Ignatius College Prep in San Francisco.

""We rowed together [in crew] the whole time, but we never became good friends until junior year when I had a class with him," said Taylor.

Taylor and Guglielmi did not plan to come to Santa Clara together, "it just worked out that way," he said. "We were looking at different schools and we decided to just let whatever was going to happen happen," said Taylor.

The best part about living on the same campus, according to both Taylor and Guglielmi, is the amount of time they are now able to spend together. They live on opposite sides of campus, but manage to get classes together and often meet for lunch and dinner. "I see him everyday," said Taylor.

How is dating each other in college different dating in high school?

"We see each other a lot more than in high school, which is a good thing, and we see each other in lots of different contexts," Guglielmi said.

"As we get older and meet different people, we're growing together," said Taylor. "We have our own groups of friends and we meet each other's friends. And there are more decisions to make."

The reason Taylor and Guglielmi believe they have been so successful in adapting their relationship to a college setting is that they genuinely enjoy each other's company.

"We're best friends, we just have so much fun together," Taylor said.

Guglielmi agreed, "You need lots of laughter and you need to have fun."