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If there is a punctuation mark that reflects Hannah Eddy’s personality, it is the exclamation point. She is tall, thin, vivacious and perpetually positive.
Ms. Eddy, 27, who grew up in Eugene, Ore., with five sisters and brothers, was known as the old soul among them. “She is very traditional in some senses,” said Jordan Eddy, one of her brothers. “She loves going on fancy dates. She loves it when the gentleman opens the door for her.”
She is not on Facebook or any other social media sites. Instead, she keeps in touch with friends by mailing them funny, artistic greeting cards with handwritten messages that are generally full of exclamation points. “If you could say I have a hobby, it is going greeting-card shopping,” she said. “In the bookstore, I’ll beeline it straight for the greeting-card section.”
In February 2014, after earning a B.A. and an M.B.A. from the University of Denver, she was offered a job at the University of Kentucky as the director of provost’s initiatives, a position that required 16 interviews, she said.
Before she started, she asked her new boss, Christine Riordan, then the provost of the university, if a boyfriend came with the job. Dr. Riordan said that, in fact, she did know of one handsome, possibly single, chemical and mechanical engineering professor: Rodney Andrews.
When Ms. Eddy saw Dr. Andrews on campus, she recognized him right away. “He has crystal blue eyes,” she said. “I already knew what he looked like because I’d been Googling him.” Dr. Andrews, who is 43 and the director of the Center for Applied Energy Research at the university, is particularly interested in researching cleaner ways to turn coal and fossil fuels into energy.
Ms. Eddy and Dr. Andrews were both members of a committee charged with formulating a five-year strategic plan for the university, so they often saw each other at meetings. “He’s a powerful, confident person,” she said. “I was really attracted to his strength.”
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Dr. Andrews, a divorced father, thought she was “very clever and very funny” and was surprised to find himself thinking about her a lot. “I wasn’t particularly looking,” he said. “I was busy and keeping busy. I was spending most of my time with my kids.” (His daughter, Quinn, is now 15; his son, Kelden, is 13.)
Ms. Eddy and Dr. Andrews really got to know each other over coffee. “I exist on a flow of caffeine and sugar throughout the day,” Dr. Andrews said. Since Ms. Eddy often complained about the undrinkable coffee at the hotel in Lexington, Ky., where she was temporarily living, he began inviting her to the Starbucks near campus. Their orders reflected their opposite personalities. Dr. Andrews, a taciturn and serious scientist, never wavers into frothy territory. He always ordered black coffee. Ms. Eddy said she usually ordered “a grande extra hot skinny cinnamon dolce latte.”
People describe Dr. Andrews as an idiosyncratic intellectual, a scientist with many unscientific interests and hobbies. He loves watching fake documentaries about Bigfoot, for instance. He makes his own bread, pasta, pickles, yogurt, cheese and hard cider. Growing up on a farm in Hadley, Mich., he read encyclopedias for fun and named the sheep he raised after Roman emperors like Nero and Claudius. “He had quirky little traits and a thirst to learn,” said Aimee Mertz, his sister.
For their first real date, he picked up Ms. Eddy in his car — a diesel Volkswagen Jetta — which he warned her was very messy. “My car is impeccably perfect most of the time, and his is a total disaster,” she said. “There’s Boy Scout fliers and pieces of dance costumes and archery bows and work things and gifts people have brought him from China. Right now, there’s a tea set in there. So many random things. I get in and don’t look.”
On their second date, he made dinner for her: homemade pasta with ham he’d cured himself. “It’s amazing, because I am literally a TV-dinner person,” she said. He also showed her his compost pile full of coffee grinds and worms. “Another thing I really admire about Rodney is his focus,” she said. “When he becomes interested in something, he skips right past the amateur phase and wants to know everything that there is to know about it.”
Dr. Andrews introduced her to all kinds of mechanical contraptions. Once, after she commented that his homemade meals were sometimes too flavorful for her, he brought home a test kit that measured her taste buds. “He proved scientifically that I am indeed a ‘super taster,’” said Ms. Eddy, who is now the senior manager for external affairs in the university’s office of the executive vice president for health affairs.
After a few dates, Ms. Eddy recalled, she asked Dr. Andrews if he wanted to be in an exclusive relationship. “I think everyone avoids that conversation because it’s hard to have,” she said. “But it’s a lot better to have that conversation than to live with the consequences of not having it.” Dr. Andrews, who appreciates clear definitions, said yes.
She began mailing him greeting cards, which arrived in a steady flow. The very first card had a diagram of a caffeine molecule on the cover. The second showed a man peering into a test tube, with the caption: “Love Doesn’t Just Happen … It’s Science, Girl.” Inside that card, Ms. Eddy wrote, “Thank you for making the ‘happy’ chemical levels in my brain soar!”
Dr. Andrews waited four months before introducing her to his children, a meeting that wasn’t awkward at all. “She just easily rolled into my life with them,” he said. Ms. Eddy, who is currently pursuing a doctorate in family sciences at the university, said: “I entered this new family in a very mindful way. I try not to be intrusive while at the same time influencing them in a positive way.”
The couple and his children began spending a lot of time together on a farm that Dr. Andrews owns in Kentucky — hiking, cooking on an outdoor grill and conducting official-seeming searches for Bigfoot using an expensive thermal-imaging camera. “He can take a lighthearted approach to life,” Ms. Eddy said. “He’s not just a scientist in his lab coat researching coal. He’s also a Bigfoot lover!”
On June 1 last year — her birthday — he proposed in the small house near campus that they had recently purchased. He made steak, potatoes and a perfect chocolate mousse. While Frank Sinatra songs — another of her favorite old school things — played in the background, he presented her with three greeting cards. “The first was a happy-birthday card,” he said. “The second card was a funny, smart-aleck card. The third was about how great it is that she’s in my life.”
Just before their wedding, on Dec. 19, Dr. Andrews received a $500 gift card from Volkswagen — a good-will gesture after it was revealed that the company had tampered with the emissions technology on its diesel cars, including his Jetta. “That Jetta bought me my beautiful pearl-drop wedding necklace!” Ms. Eddy exclaimed.
They were married at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, where the bride worked during her college years. Like a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, an enormous chandelier constructed of lights and crystals hung above people drinking tea in the historic lobby, their heavy winter coats thrown over its chintz couches.
The ceremony was held in a small room upstairs and officiated by the Rev. Thomas Mertz, the groom’s brother-in-law, who is the pastor of the South Mountain Community Church in St. George, Utah, officiated. It was brief, with 22 guests, and perfectly captured the personalities of the couple in its balance of understatement and overstatement, of reserve and exuberance.
The couple exchanged rings made of different materials: hers was platinum, while his was cobalt chrome, a material he described as “indestructible” and chose only after considering many other materials, including gold, carbon, iron, dinosaur bones and even metals contained in meteorites.
Since the groom has raised and adopted several dogs throughout his life, his sister, Ms. Mertz, read a poem titled: “How Falling in Love Is Like Owning a Dog,” by Taylor Mali. (“It will run you around the block and leave you panting, breathless. Pull you in different directions at once, or wind itself around and around you until you’re all wound up and you cannot move.”)
The bride’s brother Jordan also spoke, describing the challenges of two academics falling in love and adjusting to using their hearts rather than their brains. Several days afterward, he added: “I’ve seen intelligence get in the way of finding true love. It can be difficult to give in to your more emotional side. Hannah is a perfectionist. She has lived her life very precisely, and love is messy. So it was a risk, but it worked out pretty beautifully.”
Lovely
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