GW senior Dre Pedemonte and Georgetown University graduate Michele Giunti are both married to the enemy. 

Despite the crosstown rivalry between the two D.C. schools, the couple found love through their summer job at Balkan restaurant Ambar and agreed to spend the rest of their lives together after Pedemonte discovered a small black ring box on the table during a sushi dinner. Pedemonte and Giunti are one of several couples who tied the knot during their undergraduate careers, an experience that they said centered the future in their college lives. 

Pedemonte, an English and journalism and mass communication major from Northern Virginia, and Giunti, a then-Georgetown public policy master’s student from Rome, first met in summer 2022 at the restaurant, where she was a hostess and he was a server, exchanging quick pleasantries over a busy dinner rush.

Pedemonte said she had been working at the Balkan staple for two years before Giunti caught her eye. She said she knew almost everyone in the restaurant, so she couldn’t help but notice when a new “so cute” face joined the staff.

Pedemonte said she knew there was romance between the two in December 2022 when Giunti brought her perfume from Rome as a Christmas gift.

“It was this cute little perfume, and I remember thinking, ‘A friend who is a boy, and we’re both straight, I don’t think this is just a gift. My guy friends don’t just give me little gifts and write me notes that are very, very sweet,’” Pedemonte said. 

After receiving the gift, Pedemonte and Giunti both confessed their feelings for each other and made their relationship official in January 2023, right around the New Year. After dating for a couple months, they decided to move into an apartment together.

Pedemonte said their friends-to-lovers arc was “organic” because the relationship began with a strong platonic foundation.

“Being best friends for six months to dating, it was honestly an easy change,” she said. “He’s my person, I’m his person.”

Pedemonte said she and Giunti got engaged in March 2023 over sushi in their apartment after she had gotten back from a long, grueling shift at Ambar. She walked into their “dinky little apartment” and saw Giunti standing by the table in a nice shirt and slacks.

She said she knew “something was a bit fishy,” and it wasn’t just the sushi. During dinner, she noticed a small black ring box sitting on the table. Pedemonte opened it herself, skipping the traditional “down on one knee” moment, and found a band adorned with a pink Gerber daisy.

She said that as a “huge flower girl,” she found the gesture especially thoughtful. After she opened the ring, Giunti popped the question, and she said yes.

A little over a year later, on May 1, 2024, they exchanged vows at an Arlington, Virginia, courthouse, surrounded by close friends and Pedemonte’s family, with Giunti’s relatives from Italy joining in via FaceTime. 

She said the ring on her finger has affected her post-grad job search as she has to consider not only her own wants, but also where Giunti, who graduated May 2023, will be and what he’ll be doing. 

Pedemonte said she occasionally encounters “raised eyebrows” and “kind questioning” about the more nontraditional route of getting married while still in college compared to students who wait to complete their degree before getting hitched. She said she can’t blame others for their surprise at her marital status — she herself was, thinking it would take a “miracle” for her to get married at all, certainly not planning to do so right around college.

“In my classes still, when I tell people, you can see them computing it in their head,” she said.

Middle school sweethearts Declan McGrath, who graduated last semester with a public health degree, and Avery McEachern, who graduated last semester from Goucher College in Maryland, had their first date in eighth grade, with their parents driving them to see the live action “Beauty and the Beast.”

Eight years later, the couple was embarking on biweekly trips via the Maryland commuter rail between their colleges and will walk down the aisle in their hometown Cincinnati, Ohio, this summer.

After meeting in seventh grade, McGrath said the middle school sweethearts became official in eighth grade and, besides their 11-month break freshman year of high school before rekindling their bond in sophomore year chemistry class, have been together since.

Though McGrath said their relationship did not influence their decision to attend college in neighboring states, he said the couple traded their daily walks through the hallways of their high school for hourlong train rides every few weeks. McGrath said the prospect of marriage became “real” for them during the “medium distance” era of their relationship, as their dreams of a life together manifested into real conversations about making it happen.

McGrath said he wanted to get married right out of college partly because he didn’t want to have that sort of distance between him and McEachern. He said she studied abroad in Australia last spring, and the couple didn’t see each other for four months. McGrath said the moment he hugged her in the airport reaffirmed his desire to be with his partner forever.

“I hope to never be apart from her for that long again,” he said.

After the couple discussed this increasingly viable possibility and perused jewelers for ring options, McGrath popped the question last summer in Cincinnati. McGrath said in July he crafted collages of pictures that captured each year they had been together and hung them in McEachern’s home to greet her when she came home from teaching at the high school they went to.

“So when she would walk in, it was a museum of our life together so far, and I was just waiting on my knee,” McGrath said. 

After McEachern said yes, the affianced couple completed their final semesters at their respective colleges in the fall, adding the daunting task of wedding planning to their senior year course load.

McGrath said last summer’s engagement made it hard to return to GW in the fall, being “done” with the college experience and just wanting the next stage of his life to start. He said by then, he and McEachern were more than ready to graduate and trade their textbooks for wedding bands, encouraging them to both graduate a semester early. 

“We were just really looking forward to graduating,” he said.

McGrath said he and McEachern will be surrounded by loved ones at their garden-enclosed venue in Cincinnati, which they fell in love with immediately after touring. He said they were not very concerned about objections from their families because they both have family members who married young. But they were anxious about what their friends without those backgrounds would think, though everyone they know has been supportive.

“We were kind of shocked at how many people told us ‘congratulations’ when we hard launched it on Instagram,” McGrath said. “We felt very loved.”