Franklin Pierce University’s view of Mount Monadnock and Pearly Pond have lured many students seeking a rural, scenic atmosphere – and creates the perfect environment for young love.
While being introduced through friends or family remains the most-common way people meet their partners, according to a Pew Research survey in 2020, 17% meet their eventual soulmate through schooling.
And when that meeting happens in college, with one or both halves leaving their hometown to seek education, it’s often the case that but for that setting, the two would never have crossed paths.
Kyle and Jessica Rao
When Kyle Rao first stepped onto the Franklin Pierce campus for a tour, it was a miserable, wet day, and he wasn’t very enthused. His tour guide convinced him to come back on a day with better weather, insisting the campus couldn’t be appreciated without the full views.
If not for that return trip, Kyle’s life would look very different. For one thing, he wouldn’t have his career, working in the dining hall of Franklin Pierce. For another, he would have never met his wife.
Jessica Rao fell in love with the campus as soon as she saw it, and Kyle’s return trip left him admitting his first impression had been wrong. The two enrolled for freshman year in 2011.
One of the first things he tried to do, Kyle said, was start a Quidditch club, based on the fictional game in the “Harry Potter” series. Jessica showed up for tryouts. The club never got off the ground, Kyle said, but he and Jessica formed a friendship over shared nerdiness that lasted all four years of their time at Franklin Pierce.
They hung out in the same friend groups, and became particularly close during their senior year, when they lived in the same senior apartment complex. They even collaborated on a Halloween costume featuring their shared favorite Disney characters – Aladdin and Jasmine – when their dorm dressed up as Disney characters for community trick-or-treat.
After graduation, Kyle remained close to the campus, carrying forward a career started as a student worker for Sodexo, the catering company which provides dining on campus, and today is the supervisor of operations and catering. Jessica is a registered behavior technician working with students on the autism spectrum, and is attending graduate school.
They stayed in touch after college, and when Kyle invited Jessica to reprise their Aladdin and Jasmine costumes to go to Comic Con in Boston, two years after they’d graduated, it wasn’t an official date.
“But it was the start of something. There were those romantic sparks,” said Kyle.
It was made official shortly after, when Kyle sent a text in August of 2017 – actually sent by his former college roommate while Kyle hid under a blanket, wracked with nerves – asking for an official date.
After a year-and-a-half of dating, Kyle said he was ready to propose.
“After we’d been together, I don’t think I could ever see myself with anyone else. It didn’t seem to make sense to even think about being with someone else,” Kyle said.
After a trip to Boston to see Boston on Broadway’s performance of “The Lion King,” Kyle brought Jessica back to the place they met, to propose on the shores of Pearly Pond. The ring? The “Jasmine” edition of Zale’s Disney collection, of course.
The two had a micro-wedding amidst COVID-19, at Hidden Hills in Rindge, with 40 guests in attendance, and after saying their vows, walked back down the aisle to “A Whole New World” from the live-action “Aladdin” film.
The two plan to renew their vows, with a much larger group of family in attendance, this October.ââââââ
Tony and Kristen Cavaliere
When Tony and Kristen Cavaliere came to Franklin Pierce in 2012, neither were looking for a relationship. Then, they ended up in the same orientation group.
“We were going to college; we thought we were going to sow our wild oats, and then we looked at each other, and said, ‘Well. There goes that plan,’ ” said Kristen. “Never in 100 million years would I have thought I was the kind of person to fall in cheesy love at first sight. But I looked at him, and thought, ‘That’s it, I’m going to end up with that guy.’ ”
Tony said he felt the same.
“As cheesy as it sounds, within the first week,” Tony said, answering a question about when he knew he was going to propose. “I knew it. I didn’t do it until a year after college, but I knew pretty much from the start.”
Their first date was the annual freshman climb of Mount Monadnock, done every year at the end of orientation week. They’ve been together ever since, and recently welcomed their six-month-old daughter, Mia, to their family.
Kristen is from Vermont and Tony from Connecticut, but both fell in love with the area from the first moment they visited the campus, and after graduation, moved to Jaffrey so Tony could work for the Franklin Pierce wastewater system.
After a year, Tony got a job working for the Jaffrey Water Department, where he still works, and the couple was able to move from their small Jaffrey apartment to Keene. Kristen does some administrative work from home, but is mainly a stay-at-home mom to their young daughter.
The two got engaged on the fifth anniversary of their relationship, and married on their sixth anniversary, in 2018.
Kristen said the multi-tiered anniversary started as a joke, when she was looking ahead on the calendar to see when their anniversary might fall on a weekend, so they could celebrate on the actual day. She jokingly noted that anniversary No. 6 was on a Saturday – a good day for a wedding.
Well, why not?
The two married at Pats Peak in Henniker – it was Tony’s dream to be married on a mountain, but Kristen wasn’t enthused about the idea of climbing Mount Monadnock in a wedding dress.
Janet and Jeff Brown
Janet and Jeff Brown of Peterborough grew up only 18 miles apart, with Janet in New York and Jeff in New Jersey. They would sometimes even shop at the same stores.
But they never met until they both enrolled at Franklin Pierce College – long before it was Franklin Pierce University – in 1976.
“I joke that I had to travel 250 miles to meet a boy from Jersey,” said Janet.
Both were drawn to the small campus and idyllic rural setting of Rindge.
“My high school was four times the size, so I was looking for something small. And being a big-city girl, I wanted the country,” Janet said. “But obviously, I was meant for it, because I never went back.”
Jeff was also attracted to the smaller campus, he said, and the low student-to-teacher ratio. He and Janet officially got to know each other working in the campus radio station.
They both actually had crushes on other people, Janet said, but considered them “out of reach.” But as they got to know each other, they decided to give it a try, and got together their freshman year.
The two shared campus jobs, including working at the coffeehouse in the student union and for the dining hall. It was through the dining hall they were introduced to their eventual home of Peterborough, as they traveled there for catering jobs.
After graduation, they both started working at NEBS, a printing business in Peterborough, and lived for a short time on Union Street before buying a house on Pine Street which has become their permanent home.
“We were still dating when we decided to stay here,” Jeff said. “It probably started with the rural nature of the place, and the fact that were were able to get jobs right out of college. We had more connections here than we did in our hometowns.”
“It just fit us better. I couldn’t imagine living in the city ever again,” Janet said.
Cathie and Taylor Sage
When Cathie Sage of Peterborough first visited Franklin Pierce College in 1983, it was her first experience of the Northeast as a Virginia girl, and she fell in love with it.
While attending college, she began looking for some work in the surrounding area. A friend who worked in Peterborough was working at Sage Auto Supply in Peterborough, and recommended Cathie for a job delivering parts and stocking shelves. That was the first time she met the owner, Taylor Sage.
“To be honest, there was quite an age gap, so for the first few years we knew each other, we were just friends,” Cathie said. “Neither of us were thinking of romance.”
But Cathie had already fallen in love with Peterborough, she said. From the first time she drove down Grove Street, she had the idle thought that she would like to live there one day.
“The more I found out about it, the more I liked it and fell in love with it,” Cathie said.
So, after college, she didn’t go home to Virginia, but stayed in Peterborough, and began renting a room from Taylor. It was then, after graduation, that they began to become closer, she said.
Taylor, who had lost his first wife to cancer, said he was looking for a single, special relationship, not to date a lot of people. But he found an understanding with Cathie, despite their age gap.
“She was just a pure, honest and giving person,” Taylor said. “She was a much more mature woman than I had thought. There was this big age difference, but she seemed to fit in.”
The two married in September of 1990, in Cathie’s hometown, in the church she had grown up attending, in a large wedding with several hundred guests and a big band orchestra, before returning to Peterborough to settle for good.
Taylor ran the auto store until he retired in 1995. Cathie started a catering business, which she ran for many years in Peterborough until she retired in 2015. She now is on the board for the Cornucopia Project and the Peterborough Players, still participating in the town she fell in love with.
Ashley Saari can be reached at 603-924-7172, ext. 244, or asaari@ledgertranscript.com.