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.

Circle of Friends

While Fine and Sampson both dated their future spouses in high school, Dalia G. Trachtenberg '96 and Andrew D. Yablon, an MIT graduate student in mechanical engineering, found each other in college.

Trachtenberg wasn't yet a college student when she accompanied her brother to a dinner at MIT Hillel in the fall of 1991--and first encountered Yablon.

The two were part of the same circle of friends, but didn't date until the spring of Trachtenberg's first year at MIT--she transferred to Harvard as a sophomore--a year and a half after they first met.

The two watched movies and went out for dinner, but say they tried to keep their relationship under wraps.

Their reasons? Dating within a small group of friends can be difficult, as can dating someone four years younger, explains Yablon.

"It was a secret for the entire first month," he says. "The way it was discovered was that we were going for a walk around Mem[orial] Drive on Saturday afternoon at the Esplanade. And the rest of the MIT Hillel community..."

"Literally all of them. They were standing there staring at us," Trachtenberg remembers.

The couple broke up in the fall of Trachtenberg's sophomore year.

They cite differences in age and back-grounds--his parents are very American, she was born in Israel--as initial barriers to their relationship.

In addition, Yablon was planning to spend six months in Israel and Trachtenberg knew she had been accepted to Harvard.

The couple got back together, though, rebuilding their romance in Israel that summer.

"We spent a lot of time together, and it made up for a lot of the problems that happened the previous summer," Yablon says. "From there it was smooth sailing."

While the two will be separated next year--Trachtenberg in Israel, Yablot at MIT--they plan to reunite in Israel in 1997 for a June marriage and then move to the New York area so she can attend Columbia.

Ian R. Liston '96 and Margaret R. Chou '95 also met each other in an extracurricular atmosphere: the Harvard a capella scene.

As the business manager of the Din and Tonics and the business manager of the Radcliffe Pitches, Liston and Chou first started spending a lot of time together when they set out to plan a joint concert.

Neither of them expected the job to be as pleasant as it was.

"As a lark, I asked her to the City-Step formal as friends," Liston says.

"We didn't really expect anything of it. We had such a good time."

Many of their friends were surprised to see the two dating, because they seemed so different. She's from California, he's from Massachusetts. She was a chemistry concentrator, he history.

But the two got serious quickly. Originally, the engagement was going to be two years long. But "this spring, we cracked," Liston says, after being separated for the first summer of their relationship.

"She was in California waiting to see about medical schools, and I was at summer camp working. That was real hard," he says. "We got engaged as soon as we came out to the East Coast."

Liston and Chou are planning to get married in December.