Mika L. Sampson '96 was working with her family's horses when Clint Robinson showed up an hour early for their first date. The 15-year-old quickly changed her muddy boots and dirty clothes, and the pair drove off for a movie and dinner.

Sampson's father, who had expected his daughter to wait until age 16 to date without a chaperone, held his tongue until the two had left. Then he turned to his wife and asked, "Who said she could go out alone?"

Sampson's father isn't objecting to letting the two go out alone anymore--he is proudly announcing his daughter's engagement in the pair's hometown of Live Oak, Florida.

Randall A. Fine '96 and his fiancee Anne K. Price have also been dating for years: seven, to be exact. They met the summer after ninth grade at "nerd camp," as Price calls it. The two began talking politics in a lounge at Duke University, and three days later, Fine asked her to marry him.

Let's wait and see," Price told him, although she says she knew he was the man she would marry right from the start. So when he asked for her hand again last summer, this time she was prepared to say yes.

These couples--and others among the more than eight seniors who plan to tie the knot in the next few months--have managed to keep the spark alive through extended separation.

Long Distance Love

Running up their calling card bills and forsaking formals, Sampson and Robinson are a good example of a long distance romance that worked.

"The hardest part is just the obvious not seeing each other," Sampson says. "The phone gets old after a while. Sometimes you just want to sit there and look at each other. You can have comfortable silence in person but not on the phone."

But according to the couple, the distance makes even the most ordinary time together eniovable. When Sampson flew out for Robinson's 21st birthday, he says it was present enough.

"She was standing in the flower beds, and I was walking out the door and I noticed someone there. Then I looked up and I saw her, and I said 'Okay, I'm happy,'" he recalls, blushing.

Fine and Price, who recently graduated from Georgetown University, have also managed to find the positives in a long distance relationship.

"It's allowed us both to do better in our grades and in what we wanted to do because we didn't have the social pressures other people have had to deal with," Fine says.

The couple phoned each other every day and say their seven-year relationship became easier when they relocated to Eastern metropolitan centers.

"Those first three years when she was in Oklahoma and I was in Kentucky, we only saw each other on vacations," Fine says, adding that the two were able to spend some week-ends together in college.