Amy and Jonathan met when Amy visited the University of Pennsylvania as a prospective graduate student in March of 2008. Jonathan had started there the previous fall. Over drinks at a reception, they discovered that they loved the same poets, like John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop. During the five years they overlapped at Penn, they developed a strong friendship and close intellectual bond. Jonathan wrote Amy searching but fastidious emails; Amy brought Jonathan limoncello back from Italy and parsed his notes in the margins of library books in their field.
Jonathan left the City of Brotherly Love for several years, but after he returned in 2019, the friendship between the two entered a new phase, from which love soon blossomed. During the first year of the pandemic, they hardly saw anyone but each other. The quality time agreed with them. They exchanged spontaneous poems and curated playlists, logged hundreds of miles walking to see each other across the city, and discovered that their best friend was also the person they wanted to spend the rest of their life with. They can’t wait to be married.