While studying history is a relatively new academic profession, people have been practicing history for eons. In his course on the philosophy of history, Columbia professor Mark Mazower explores these various conceptions of history that reach beyond the conventions of academic history, seeking to imbue the (human) past with meaning. The “How We Met” story is one of these types of histories. Their endless retellings crystallize them into more than memories, and their connection to fact and the present makes them more than mere stories.

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“Falling in love,” Mazower explained, “is the archetypal extraordinary moment. And yet it happens to a lot of people, so it’s both extraordinary and a social phenomenon.” Studying these histories reveals the intricacies of campus life, the changing nature of love over time, and how these stories connect to the truth of the past. 

Former Columbia professor Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi wrote, in a work on Jewish historical memory, that “with the departure of Adam and Eve from Eden, history begins, historical time becomes real, and the way back is closed forever.” In reality, however, history begins as soon as Adam and Eve first meet and an “other” is introduced. Able to now compare their memories with one another, they forge a new type of knowledge, a new kind of history—one that has always been and will always be a social activity. 

Campus romances are particularly Edenic. After graduation, these relationships spin off in all directions. Some lead to the altar and picket fences, while others to irresolvable disputes and separate lives. Nonetheless, there is something wonderful and irreproducible about the love that is fostered within the 116th Street gates. College is a purgatory, a dividing line, and a buffer period between childhood and adult life. To look back from outside this protected bubble is to recreate the history of a singular time, unique in its inability to be recreated. 

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Mary-Ann, CC ’90, and Mitch Feller, SEAS ’89, met pledging the same co-ed fraternity in the fall of 1986, but their story, according to them, does not begin there. It does not begin with Mary-Ann singing in the glee club and Mitch playing trumpet in the marching band. Instead, two decades earlier, the two attended the same base nursery at Andrews Air Force Base. “We joke around that we were like little ducklings and imprinted on each other,” Mary-Ann shared.

After graduation, they got engaged. With Mitch in Poughkeepsie and Mary-Ann in New York City, they dated long distance. They were removed from the protective bubble of campus where they had grown close and thrown into a new and unpredictable world. After a year of long-distance, they broke up.

Now separated, Mary-Ann and Mitch’s perception of their time together on campus was different. Previously, their “How We Met” story had led to a couple, while in this newer version, it led to a separation. The effects of an event change not only our perception of it, but what really happened and how it connects to a wider history. Their true history had literally changed. This is because history is always an interpretative act created by the present. “The present, in a way, helps to shape what one sees as important to talk about,” commented Mazower. “One doesn’t always understand how and why it does, sometimes that only comes later on. But I think the best history is responding to some kind of present concerns or present needs.” 

History, then, isn’t written by victors; it’s written by us. Divorcées, happy couples, and widows—amid the dust of bygone battles and forgotten wars—stare back into the morass of the past waiting for it to transform into something coherent, something that speaks to us now, and something that explains how we ended up here.

Tanner Chen, CC ’23, and Madeline Wang, CC ’24, met for the first time during a club meeting in the fall of 2020 (Tanner and Madeline are pseudonyms). Both were in their childhood bedrooms: Madeline had never left hers, and Tanner had returned after only a semester and a half of pre-Covid Columbia. They have no recollection of that first Zoom meeting. 

When they tell me this story, they share a smoothie, each taking sips from the straw. Both get a sandwich. Madeline, after eating half of hers, silently passes the other half to Tanner. It’s so regular, so expected. It’s things as they should be.

Tanner and Madeline became closer during that first semester though they had no romantic interest in one another. When Tanner visited campus during spring break and had no place to crash, Madeline offered him the unoccupied second bed in her room. Tanner did not have meal swipes (and was not “legally” allowed on campus), so Madeline brought meals back to her room for him. Sometime during that week—neither has a clear idea of when—they shifted from being friends in a club to something more.

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After a year apart, Mary-Ann and Mitch were both in New York City again and found their way back to each other. “What’s unique about it is that we did find each other, and the relationship was right,” Mary-Ann told me. “When we first got engaged, it was probably the wrong time. We had some more maturing to do. We had some more growing too, in this case apart, but because it was the right person, we ended up back together.”

It is odd that, in most histories, we search for examples of human agency and freedom; yet in our relationships, we comb our past for signs of fate. This is a truth we feel that history, uniquely, can reveal: what had to be and what merely is, what is necessary and what is contingent. History and historical narratives show us a truth about, as Mazower noted, “the various paths people have taken.” These paths are never entirely determined and never entirely freely chosen. In history, “It’s the balance between what’s necessity and what’s freedom. They’re there together in such a strange way,” Mazower said. We are bound to history just as we are bound to nature. And yet, somehow, within both those spheres, we strive for a sense of freedom. 

History enables us to see the bounds of action and the limits of agency. For Tanner and Madeline, looking back on their own history has only solidified their perceptions of the present. In efforts to make their story more digestible for their audience, they have simplified the narrative. “You get better as you realize people don’t care,” they told me. But this narrative choice comes with consequences. “In simplifying the retelling, the emotion feels more certain,” Tanner elaborated. The doubt in the early days of the relationship either becomes a core element of the story or is cast aside. This, like all history, may change with time. As Mary-Ann expressed, thirty years removed from undergrad life, “The older you get, the more you hone in on what’s really important to you. And what’s really important in life.” Mary-Ann and Mitch’s pause may be a case in point. “The further we get away from it,” Mitch recalled, “the more of a little hiccup it becomes, but at the time, it was kind of an earthquake!” From a hiccup to an earthquake, the historical reality of an event changes.

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Beth McCoy, BC ’84, met Carl Haber, CC ’80, GSAS ’85, in a woodcutting class in 1983. Forty years later, they sit side by side at the kitchen table, still doing art together. After meeting, however, it took them three years to date. The first year they knew each other, it was only as friends. A few times, they would “walk all the way down Broadway and,” as Beth remembers, “end up way down at the bottom” of the island.

But a year later, both were gone from Columbia and the places that had fostered their relationship. Beth joined the Peace Corps; Carl did a postdoc in Chicago. Three years later, both ended up in Berkeley, California. Beth had grown up there and returned home while Carl was working in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Physics Division. One evening—Jan. 10, 1986—he was waiting for the bus and she was walking down the hill. They looked up and saw each other. For Beth, it wasn’t out of the ordinary to see an old friend. “Oh, hi. How are you?” he said. “Oh, hi. How are you?” she replied. 

Beth and Carl’s story has not changed much in the decades they’ve been together. Similarly, Sherri, CC ’90, and Doug Wolf’s, CC ’88, story has stayed mostly consistent. They met moving into their randomly assigned Hartley suite in the fall of 1987. Doug remembers perhaps meeting Sherri the year before, though Sherri, when I speak to her separately, does not mention this. 

They became close friends that year. In the spring, they took a sociology course together, sitting next to each other every class with Doug doodling in Sherri’s notebook. The summer after Doug graduated, they became even closer. Removed from campus, they slowly started dating. 

Soon, the relationship became serious, and, in 1992, they were married. The day after their wedding, they moved to Boston. It was the first time since Hartley Hall that they would live together. Away from campus and New York, their connections to Columbia faded. They had kids and settled into their careers, leaving Morningside Heights in the past.

Slowly, however, they became more involved with their alma mater. Eventually, they became a core part of the Columbia College Alumni Association, both serving as its president. Columbia, Doug explained, “was a mutual identity for us. We have always appreciated the school and what the school has done for us, our network, our professional network, our social network.” 

For Doug and Sherri, history is a communal activity that requires constant effort to maintain. Casual acquaintances of the Wolfs on campus have become some of their closest friends in the years after graduation. Their stories overlap, meld, and transform into a shared history of the time and place of campus, reinforced by their present efforts to shape campus.

What Beth and Carl have taken from Columbia, however, is less a network or a collection of stories, but an orientation towards the world. Columbia’s knowledge-seeking ethos fits into the broader history of their lives—lives defined by constant questioning and learning. They read their kids the children’s versions of Shakespeare and Homer, describing the Greek poet as “our family mascot.” Carl, in a convocation address to GSAS in 2013, told the graduating class that “curiosity is the gateway drug to creativity.” For their relationship and their lives, this connection between curiosity and creativity, between art and science has been there from the start, from the first day of woodcutting class in 1983. 

History is another type of education: It teaches us about who we are and what to value. The stories scaffold our wider beliefs and conceptions about the human condition through particular lives and particular stories. Who we are is revealed to us through the actions of previous generations or, for the couples, previous versions of themselves.

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The “How We Met” story and the history it reveals changes based on the present and defines who we are, becoming a type of active mythmaking. 

In each story, however, there is an inherent tension between the history and the reality it seeks to capture: The stories often end with the narrative assertion that the end was written in the beginning all along. History, meanwhile, must continue eternally. The “happily ever after” of our most famous relationship stories speak of a new Paradise, a place once again freed from the burdens of historical time. But this cannot actually happen. Time moves on and relationships continue to grow and change.

The individual histories contain, within their particularity, wider histories of the time and place. The entire world is contained within a single individual, a single moment, a single story. All we could ever learn about ourselves and an era, we could learn from examining one couple’s story. “We don’t go to history to be bound,” Mazower told me, “We go to history to be freed from our preconceptions.” At its core, history teaches us about who we were, who we are, and our possibilities as societies, individuals, and couples falling in love. 

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