The Nerdy Couple
Julie and Gerard first met in Trinity College's palaeography class and went out a few times with the rest of Julie’s Master’s program for tea and chats.
Then they discovered that they each loved The Lord of the Rings. Three hours later when they both were meant to have had prior commitments, they were solidly friends.
Over the course of the 2010-2011 school year, they enjoyed their platonic time together, but Julie went back to America and Gerard stayed in Dublin to finish his PhD, and it looked pretty much like that was that.
They’d decided to be penpals, however. And, surprisingly, they actually followed through. Julie sat in her room at her Grandmother’s house and despaired why she couldn’t find a boyfriend that paid as much attention to her as this great friend.
Cue Kalamazoo!
At the International Medieval Conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan, they met again. In between delivering their conference papers and eating delicious Indian food, they discovered that they were both single, and when Gerard kissed Julie on the cheek as he boarded his bus to the airport, Julie danced all the way back to her room.
But there was still a small problem. 3,023 miles, in fact.
The universe is a funny thing, though. When it’s not juggling white dwarfs and barfing out stars, it sometimes pushes you in the direction you’re meant to go. And Julie found herself back in Dublin, first as an au pair, then as a PhD candidate.
They would meet in the Science Gallery Cafe at Trinity and show each other mementos from their childhood, talk about their love of books and dinosaurs, and Gerard wooed Julie with batches of homemade chocolate muffins. Julie ate them all, got on the train, and waved shyly goodbye.
When a mutual friend’s plans fell through to visit them one weekend, Julie and Gerard decided to hang out with each other, anyway. They cooked sausages in red wine and finally admitted that they liked one another.
Fast forward through ups and downs, two PhDs, multiple flights back and forth between Dublin and Providence, language teaching and language learning, visas and almost-jobs in Japan and life and the beautiful calm of Sundays after mass, walking through the National Botanic Gardens together, searching for fat dumbledores and cabbages, and having tea and cake in the tea rooms.
On a busy day in autumn, November the 4th if you want to know, Julie met Gerard late in the afternoon at the Gardens, when the orange gold light was just fading. He took her by the hand and they ran, the guards calling after them that the gates would be closing soon, and they ducked under the foam-laden branches of a Greek Strawberry tree. There, under the shade of the white flowers, Gerard got down on one knee. Julie jumped up and down and said yes, of course yes, a thousand times yes, and he put the ring on her finger. And when they kissed, the bells rang through the Garden, signalling the end of day,* but for Gerard and Julie, it wasn’t the end, at all.
‘And he took her in his arms and kissed her under the sunlit sky, and he cared not that they stood high upon the walls in the sight of many.’ - JRR Tolkien, The Return of the King, Bk 6, Ch 5
*no really. It happened.
