Ms. Adams said that it was quickly clear to her that this wasn’t just a last-chance college romance. “It felt so different from anything I had ever felt before,” she said.
After graduation, both returned home to Washington State, where their families lived about 20 miles apart in the Seattle metropolitan area. Ms. Fletcher is now a campaign manager for the majority leader of Washington’s House of Representatives and is to become a consultant in the Seattle office of the Boston Consulting Group in January. Ms. Adams is a data scientist for the research institute of MedStar Health, a health care system based in Columbia, Md.
Ms. Fletcher said that getting to know Ms. Adams in the context of her family, which includes six nephews, was inspiring. “Seeing how she was with the people who are important to her made me want to be one of those important people,” she said.
In the years that followed, they returned to Hanover, N.H., where Dartmouth is based. They then moved to Washington D.C., and to Ann Arbor, Mich., where Ms. Fletcher obtained a master’s degree in public policy and an M.B.A. in May from the University of Michigan. Ms. Adams is now studying for a master’s degree in computer science through an online program at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
They have driven across the country together four times and now are back in Washington State.
On June 20, the couple were married at the vacation home in Quilcene, Wash., of Ms. Adams’s family, with 19 guests attending. (Both will use Adams as a middle name and Fletcher as their surname.) Ryan S. Adams, one of Ms. Adams’s brothers, presided at the couple’s marriage, having become a Universal Life minister for the occasion. They had planned a big wedding at an events space on Whidbey Island, outside Seattle, but postponed that until 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’ll begin a new chapter, starting a family, shortly thereafter,” Ms. Adams said. “It just felt like the right time to take that next step.”