How We Met Spotlight:

Meet Kate and Santi

I met my husband Santi in the spring of my sophomore year in college, while I was doing a semester abroad in Madrid. We dated casually, and when it was time for me to go back home, we promised to write, but that was it. Neither one of us would have believed that seven years later, we would end up getting married!

Back in the States, I filled my time with my studies and more travel: a summer in the mountains of Mexico with the American Friends Society, after graduation a few months in Costa Rica doing AIDS education with teenagers, and then after a brief stop home, back to Costa Rica, this time with the Peace Corps. Through it all, Santi and I kept up our correspondence. He kept inviting me back to Spain, but there was always somewhere else to go, or something else to do.

After my Peace Corps service ended, I again declined his offer, but this time turned the tables: Why didn’t he come join me on my trip to Ecuador and Peru? Much to my surprise, he accepted, and soon we were faxing back and forth to make our plans. When he called me in Costa Rica to pin down the last-minute details, it was strange to hear his voice again after so long. His Castilian “th” for “c” seemed so foreign, and the cadences were jarring after I had gotten so used to the smoother, more melodious tones of Latin America.

But then we spent ten days in Ecuador, getting reacquainted, and it all came back. It was a romantic vacation, but would that be all? We flirted with the idea of keeping things going, but the idea of a long-distance relationship didn’t really appeal to either of us. He had a steady job that would be hard to duplicate in the States, and I was anxious to get back to my own country again, get a job, go back to school, and finally settle down. Once again, we promised to write.

I found a job with a teen pregnancy prevention program while I looked into Master’s programs. Should I get a degree in Social Work? Public Health? And where? Though I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, I did know one thing: I wanted to be able to use my Spanish.

I researched programs online, and tried out this new thing called email that my father had told me about while I was away. At the beginning of 1998, Santi got an account as well, and suddenly our periodic communication turned into daily messages. I raced home from work every day to check my inbox, and Santi got up early to check his before work. And the rest, as they say, was history. A few months later, I decided to take the plunge, and we agreed to get married.

At the time, it seemed a little bit crazy. Sure, we had been writing back and forth for several years, but there hadn’t been much “face time.” Still, I held my breath and bought a ticket for Spain. Now, eight years later, we are still going strong. Surprisingly, we haven’t had to overcome many cultural differences in our relationship, aside from the ongoing debate over the proper consistency of cooked vegetables (he says mushy; I say firm.) Now I am working on getting a teaching degree that will qualify me to teach English in the public schools. And yes, I am getting to use my Spanish!

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