Devon's Point of View

William Nelson...What a journey it was to have him officially ask me out!

I became a counselor super last minute for Camp Kesem after my first year of college. (a non profit that supports college students in planning and executing a week of camp for kids with close family members affected by cancer.)

That first day I got onto that bus knowing no one. At the first rest stop, I saw William walk off with the little ones and immediately whispered to a returning counselor saying “that one is cute.” She told me, “Ya, but sadly he is dating someone.” So I moved on, tried to set my sights elsewhere.

In our second year of college, time went on in our Kesem and Santa Clara University lives. We slowly got to know each other through brief hellos in the library and our mutual love for Kesem as now coordinators that helped plan and prepare for camp.

Near the end of sophomore year, I was at one of my sorority mixers, which opened up to another sorority’s mom’s weekend. Not ready to go home, but also extremely claustrophobic from the influx of people I tried to plan my next move.

I saw a message in the Kesem group chat from William. Apparently the rugby boys had not been very successful in their date event party so they were opening it to anyone. I thought to myself, hey maybe actually getting to know William past our brief interactions would be cool!

When I went to hang out with him I started getting flirty. I mean its not like he became any less cute and now he was single! He seemed to be completely clueless despite all the signals I was sending. He was telling me over and over how my friends had said no to him for this date event. Like hello! William. So I did what I have seen over and over in the romantic comedies I have been watching since I was 10 years old. I kissed him to get him to stop talking. And he kissed me back!

We started texting and talking more after that. I was courageous at one point and asked if he wanted to watch a movie and split a bottle of wine. After waiting around 4 hours for a response, he replied with, “That sounds like a great idea, let’s watch it at my house with the rugby boys!” I was crushed. It was a total shutdown. He said he had been worried to be involved with technically a co-worker, since we planned camp together.....ugh! lame!

But obviously, he later realized his mistake and how much he was missing out on! But! The saga did not end there. William was off to Copenhagen in less than three months and he would be gone until Christmas time. We (more him haha) realized the start of a relationship while in completely different countries would not be in either of our best interests. So we went somewhat our separate ways and saw other people. But we wrote each other letters and called almost every other week for a couple hours on FaceTime. His mom said she knew he would date me when he got back when she realized he was sending handwritten letters to me that she was to deliver.

And when William came back in January we clicked back so easily and were dating a month later. I do not think either of us were sure what our future together looked like. But when the pandemic happened during our senior year we found ourselves spending a lot more time together and really fell in love. Together we had something special that neither of us wanted to let go of after graduation.

We had both applied to the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and despite the pandemic, the program would still go forward. I was placed in Scranton, PA and William was placed in Syracuse, NY. We drove cross country together in my Prius with all our belongings piled in the back. We spent the year visiting one another every couple months or so, sometimes meeting up in snow filled parks in Binghampton (the town between Scranton and Syracuse).

After our year of service, neither of us was quite ready to go back to school yet, even though we knew we wanted to. Will stayed on as a supervisor at his JVC job, and I moved up to Syracuse and became a nanny for a sweet family in Liverpool. We moved into a small Syracuse apartment in Tipperary Hill and lived together for the first time. We had the best time fostering cats, hanging out with the new set of Jesuit volunteers, and exploring the East Coast. During that year, William applied to Master programs for Public Health and I applied to law school.

Experiencing two winters together was an adventure, and one we felt we had sufficiently experienced. So we looked at schools in California. William chose UC Davis and I chose his father’s alma mater, McGeorge School of Law. We drove cross country back to California and was joined by William’s mother! This meant we actually got to stay in nice places unlike our cross country trip together the two years prior where William chose hotels in the $45 dollars a night realm….!

Will graduated from UC Davis this past September and I am in the trenches of my second year of law school.

Knowing that my second year would bring a lot of craziness, William and I worked together to pick out a ring this summer and schedule some time together in Carmel for no particular reason….haha.

And while I may have not been entirely surprised when he got down on one knee on Carmel Beach the morning of September 1st, I have never been more joyful than in that moment knowing I get to spend my life with William.

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