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October 25, 2018 | By Anne Kniggendorf

Like many St. John’s graduates, Rick and Elizabeth Stephan (A78) were married on the steps of McDowell Hall in Annapolis. They cut a cake bearing the college seal, ready to spend the rest of their lives together.

Unlike the subjects of many St. John’s-borne unions, however, the Stephans weren’t young alumni in their early twenties. They were married in September 2016, nearly 40 years after graduation—and after deciding not to marry after their senior-year engagement.

After finishing the Program in 1978, Elizabeth returned home to Virginia and Rick to Pennsylvania. They commuted the three hours for visits, but the relationship didn’t hold. The pair broke up in December of 1978 and didn’t speak to each other for 36 years. In 2014, however, everything changed—or, as Elizabeth thinks of it, returned to the way it had been.

“I went to bed the Thursday night before he emailed me and I was like, ‘I’m good. I’ve got a job I really like; I own two houses on my own; I’ve got a great daughter; I have close friends. I’m done dating for quite a while.’ Then I got his email,” she recalls.

Rick had heard a Bette Midler song on the radio that inspired him to break the decades-long silence. He was separated from his wife and a resident at Mt. Sinai in New York. Elizabeth had been unhappily dating for several years and was working as a lawyer and living in Washington, DC. She decided to write back. They spoke on the phone. By the following Monday, they were together for dinner at her house.

When she saw him at the train station in Washington, DC, she says, “It was this sense of inevitability. It was this sense of coming home.”

“You would think that with that much time and all the marriages and moves and kids, that you would be a very different person,” she says. “The thing we both found out about each other was the person we brought to St. John’s is the person that we still continue to be.”

She adds, “There’s something about the St. John’s experience that binds you to people,” she adds. “Everybody has the same experience because they have the same classes, they read the same books. It’s such a small community. There’s this sense of having been through something pretty extraordinary.”

The year 2016, as it turned out, was also lucky for alumni Ron Fielding (A70) and Susan Lobell (A70). Fielding and Lobell met at St. John’s their freshman year when they both worked to clear the dining hall after lunch and ready it for dinner.

“We met and were in a romantic relationship starting the first day,” Fielding recalls.

“Yes, Cupid was there,” adds Lobell.

They stayed together for their undergraduate education but parted soon after. Lobell was ready to marry right after graduation, but Fielding wanted to go to graduate school and wasn’t ready to marry for another 14 years—by which time they were both with other people.

Then, in 2011, Fielding was in New York City on business and asked to meet Lobell for lunch. Their conversation was great, he says, but they didn’t realize how important this second phase of their relationship would be until spending a week on the Santa Fe campus for the Summer Classics program in 2012.

“In the September of your life, after your family has grown and you’re now living a retired life, reuniting with someone you met in your youth is just much easier than being introduced to some random divorcée friend of a friend and starting from square one,” says Fielding. “For starters, anyone who’s age appropriate is old, whereas if you reconnect with somebody you met when you were a teenager, you see through the wrinkles.”

For Lobell, it was the feeling that she was on the same wavelength with Fielding that was important. She had sought the Johnnie listening skills and conversational give-and-take in previous relationships, but found it impossible to force.

“I didn’t realize how impossible it was to make someone else who hadn’t had the Johnnie experience into that person,” she says.

Fielding and Lobell married in 2016 after 41 years apart. They’re both retired now—Fielding from investment management and Lobell from teaching high school math—and enjoy reading the Wall Street Journal together and catching all the subtle Great Books references (as well as attending Summer Classics each year).

“For better or worse,” Lobell says, “I fell in love with him right away.”

Interestingly, for couple Daniel Cleavinger (SF69) and Melissa Benedict (SF69), love hadn’t been in the air in the least during their undergraduate years. Though they were both in the second class to graduate from the Santa Fe campus, they had barely known each other.

They continued their lives separately; Cleavinger married and joined the Peace Corps, then the National Guard, eventually attending law school at University of New Mexico (UNM) and becoming a magistrate judge. Benedict also attended graduate school at UNM, eventually becoming an accountant. Despite their close proximity, the pair rarely saw each other, busy with their own careers and families.

Forty-five years later, however, Benedict and Cleavinger (now both divorced) ran into each other at a memorial event for Connie Weigle (SF68), daughter of former St. John’s president Richard Weigle, on the St. John’s campus. Connie had been Benedict’s closest friend, and when Cleavinger stood up and spoke about her during the event, Benedict was moved by his candor and warm memories of Connie.

The following month, they both attended Homecoming. Benedict had made up her mind to speak with Daniel if she saw him there, and they fell into conversation during Sunday brunch in front of the library. By the time they parted ways, they each hoped to stay in contact.

Benedict, who had been single for more than 20 years, had her doubts, but Cleavinger assuaged them. They moved in together soon after.

“I was very wary of trying to engage in any relationship,” she says. “The fact that we were both Johnnies and had that shared experience made it easier to consider getting together. And we found so much in common: intellectual interests, our love for the college and for living in New Mexico, speaking Spanish, friends from back in the day ... ”

Cleavinger agreed, adding that meeting someone new as they approached their seventies might have been tricky were it not for the Johnnie connection.

Adds Benedict, “There’s a powerful shared history between us because of our time at St. John’s. Now we can enjoy retirement together in a beautiful place.”

“Having the St. John’s love for philosophy and discussion really gives us a way of always being able to connect and feel comfortable with each other,” he says. “I think it made a big difference.”