So, how did you two meet?

“It’s kind of nice when you marry your best friend,” says Aragon teacher Jennifer Condon about her fiancé, Alan, who she plans to marry this summer.

Condon isn’t the only Aragon teacher with a significant other with whom to spend this Valentine’s Day. In fact, she is just one of the many Aragon teachers who are in a relationship; whether it is with somebody they met this year or over two decades ago.

“We met in April… we’d been dating and were happy,” Condon continues. “We’re both addicted to sushi,” she says, adding that they plan to marry in a Japanese tea garden. “We’re both Jewish. It’ll be like a Jewish-Japanese culture wedding.”

Condon’s fiancé, a doctor, is set to move to San Mateo after finishing school in Oregon. In addition to “lots of similar interests”, Condon and her fiancé come from similar backgrounds. “We’re both from really similar families,” she says. “His mom was a teacher like me, which is really cool.”

Just like many student couples at Aragon, some teachers found love while they were still in school. “We went to the same college,” says Spanish teacher Giselle Hunter, who met her husband while they attending Mary Washington University in Virginia. “He played baseball and I played lacrosse. We met through friends.”

Environmental Science teacher Amy Schwartz also met her eventual husband while attending college, in her case at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. “The first time we hung out…I went to a mutual friend’s apartment and watched the Summer Olympics there,” says Schwartz. “Jim–my husband–was there and kept on making jokes and making me laugh. Our relationship grew out of the friendship we formed on that day watching the Olympics together.”

Other Aragon teachers used modern technology to find true love. “We were online dating,” says Holly Dietz about her husband. Dietz says that, initially, she was skeptical about online dating. “It can be a little weird…At first I was like, ‘I’m never dating online.’ I was totally prejudiced against it,” she admits.

“I had signed up on two sites. There was more of an obscure one; it was really bad. I couldn’t figure how to shut it down,” she says. “But, randomly, my [future] husband contacted me there.”

History and Psychology teacher Jim Smith met his wife while working at a restaurant known as The Gatehouse in Palo Alto and later followed her to Cornell University. “I was a bartender and she was a waitress,” he recalls. “It was love at first sight.” Smith and his wife have been married for 27 years.

History teacher Ron Berggren says, “I met my wife on the Fourth of July. Our families knew each other, but we didn’t.” Both families had cabins in the Santa Cruz Mountains. “They think they set us up,” he says of the couple’s parents, “but they didn’t.” In the beginning, the couple faced a major roadblock. “The problem was, I was still [living] on the East Coast and I had to go back in about three weeks,” Berggren explained. “She thought she’d never see me again.”

The two carried on with a long-distance relationship for some time. “I could call from New York for cheap rates after 11,” Berggren remembers. But, they eventually were reunited. “A couple of months later I sent her plane tickets.” They were engaged at Christmas.

English teacher James Daniel is nearing 15 years of marriage with his wife, Victoria Daniel, also an Aragon English teacher. “She was a student teacher during my first year,” he says. “Her master teacher told me about a ‘cute student teacher’.”

At first, however, Mrs. Daniel already had a boyfriend. “I asked her for a drink and we ended up staying out for seven hours.” They remained friends for some time until, “[they] finally decided to become more than friends at a [restaurant] called Cha Cha.” Three years later, the couple became engaged when he proposed in Jamaica.

His wife remembers it clearly. “He dropped the ring in the sand when I was not looking, then pretended to just spot it. He said that someone must have lost their ring and I bought it hook, line and sinker,” recalls Mrs. Daniel. “Then he said it looked like his grandmother’s ring, and I was still clueless. Then he got down on one knee and asked me.”

Mrs. Daniel had been waiting for that moment for some time. “I was certain he was going to ask me on my birthday the previous year and I watched every move he made that night with the expectant eye of a girl about to be engaged. When he didn’t ask, I was devastated and I vowed never to get my expectations up again. That’s why I was so clueless.”

The two married in June of 1999. “We were married…at a family friend’s gorgeous Hillsborough estate. A garden wedding–it was lovely. I wasn’t nervous–I was so excited. I knew it was right.”

From friends to fiancées, to love at first sight, meeting the person you want to spend the rest of your life with comes about in many ways. Although some stories are more unexpected than others, the stories of these teachers have a happy ending in common.