Rachel Dawn Wertz, a full-time university student, saw Mr. Eversden immediately. Both Americans, Ms. Wertz, 25, said she could tell he was from the United States “just by the running shoes and jeans” he was wearing.
“He had a baseball cap on, you know, nobody else who isn’t from the US would wear it,” added Ms. Wertz, who had lived all over the world growing up because of her father’s job.
She introduced herself to Mr Eversden, 24, who said he was “astonished at how friendly she was and how genuinely interested she seemed to be getting to know me.” It didn’t hurt that he thought she was “very, very beautiful.”
Over the following weeks, the two hung out as friends, and in November they traveled with another student to Barcelona, Spain. Each was attracted to each other, but even after a romantic evening on the beach in Barcelona, they kept their feelings to themselves.
“I think we both understood that I was staying and that he was going back to the US,” Ms Wertz said.
On Mr. Eversden’s last night in Rome, he and Mrs. Wertz went out to dinner to celebrate the end of the semester. When she got home that evening, she realized she wanted to tell Mr. Eversden how she felt. A few hours before his flight from Italy, she called him to confess her crush.
While he was happy to hear from her, Mr. Eversden also felt “a little heartbreak because I was leaving for the airport in four hours and I would have known I’d met someone very special.”
They continued to talk in the months after Mr. Eversden resumed his studies at American University in Washington, but by the spring of 2018 they had largely lost contact. In August, both traveled to Paris – Mr Everdsen for a vacation and Mrs Wertz to visit her brother – where they reconnected in person almost a year after the first meeting.
“It actually didn’t go well at all,” said Mrs. Wertz. “I think the build-up of expectations has overwhelmed us both a bit.”
They did not speak for the next seven months.
In the spring of 2019, Ms Wertz reached out to Mr Eversden to catch up. Both had plans to be in London in May and when they realized their visits would overlap for a day, they decided to meet for dinner. At this reunion, both said their romantic feelings returned.
After saying goodbye, “we both cried on the return journey from our plane,” Mr Eversden said. For the rest of the school year, Mrs. Wertz said she “just thought about Andrew all the time.”
After graduating in Spring 2020, Ms. Wertz decided to look for jobs in Europe and the US, including Washington, where Mr. Eversden continued to live after graduating in 2019.
She told herself that if she got a job in another city, she would eventually force herself to leave him. After applying to hundreds of positions, she was offered a spot on the AmeriCorps program — and was assigned to Washington.
When she told Mr. Eversden, he “just about fell off my chair,” he said.
Mrs. Wertz moved to town in June and within a month they were officially in a relationship. She now works as a local marketing associate at Total Wine & More in Bethesda, Maryland. Mr. Eversden is a reporter for Breaking Defense in Washington.
In July 2021, he proposed the Department of Education building in Washington, the US equivalent of the Italian government building that the two met outside in Rome. The couple married on April 17 at Villa Siena, an Italian-style event venue in Gilbert, Arizona, for Jordan Gustafson, a Presbyterian pastor, and about 70 vaccinated guests.
