Anne & Joe in Baltimore, MD

Anne and Joseph were close friends long before they became romantically linked. They met in their first weeks at Notre Dame and were soon each other’s “confidant and support for everything,” as Anne remembers. There was always, however, “an element of romance” -- like how when Anne had had a hard day, Joe would sneak into her room and leave daisies on her bed. After graduation, Anne moved home to Los Angeles, while Joe was commissioned as an officer and sent first to Ft. Lewis in Washington, and then to El Paso, TX. Then it hit them: “We couldn’t pinpoint when it had started, but we realized we had been in love with each other for a long time,” Anne says. The Bride Anne Geary, 27, a village manager The Groom Joseph (Joe) Brinker, 26, a technology consultant The Date September 30 After a year of long-distance dating, Anne moved to El Paso, and two and a half years after that, Joe asked her to marry him. The pair finally wed almost exactly eight years after they’d met.