Love Story From a Simpler Time for Dating

Dating was much simpler when I was a student. 

I arrived on campus my sophomore year before the dining halls opened, to learn how to operate new typesetting equipment at The Daily Princetonian. 

I bumped into a student who had lived next door to me the previous year and we headed for Nassau Street to find something to eat for dinner. He spotted an attractive young woman sitting on the grass along path in front of Nassau Hall and stopped to say hello. He introduced her as Cathy. She was reading a science fiction novel. I told her some of us watched Star Trek reruns in my dorm room every night at 6 and invited her to join us some night. 

A night or two later, she was reading the novel in front of the closed door to my room, waiting for me. We watched the show, after which I walked her back to her dorm and up to her room. Then we talked until dawn. 

With a few bumps along the way, we were together from then on. She moved into my dorm room at the start of my junior year and the following spring, in May of 1974, we married, so we could qualify for extremely rare married student housing as seniors and cook for ourselves. 

Some of our friends said the marriage wouldn’t last a year. Our joke was they didn’t say which year. It turned out to be 2020, when she died, at age 68.