The next day Pereira reconsidered and asked Kahn out.

Kahn said yes.

The two spent their first date in an Iranian restaurant.

"The waitress was from a former Soviet republic. She smoked Marlboros and had a huge tattoo," he recalls. "That was our first romantic date."

Pereira says the first date was all it took.

"I fell head over heels in love," he says. "We saw each other every minute of every day until I left for Harvard. We decided before I left that we were going to get married."

"It was nerd romance," he says.

The pair vowed to keep in touch as they headed to college--Kahn to the University of California at Los Angeles and Pereira to Harvard.

Pereira says he has known he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Kahn since one night during the summer before he came to college.

"We were on a bluff over looking Laguna Beach. It was the classic setting: a full moon, a summer's night. I was looking out at the ocean and this feeling of eternity came over me. I thought if this moment could last forever, I wanted it to," Pereira says.

They kept their commitment throughout their college years, frequently racking up telephone bills of $600 a month.

"I realized at that point that this wasn't worth pursuing unless we were headed towards something like marriage," Pereira says.

He proposed during their sophomore year.

As a trick, Pereira told Kahn he didn't want her to buy him anything for Christmas. She expected he would do the same. Instead, he presented her with a small stuffed tiger. In a hat perched on the tiger's head, Pereira hid a diamond ring.

"The first thing she did was throw away the hat," he says. "I had to redirect her attention to the hat."