When John Damianos’s cellphone began buzzing on the Dartmouth campus in September 2015, he realized he was being FaceTimed by Vungelia Glyptis, a fellow student whom he had not talked to in two years.
Before answering the phone, Mr. Damianos was in a panic.
“We hadn’t spoken in quite a while, and I knew she was studying abroad in Copenhagen,” he said. “My first thought was ‘Oh my gosh, she must be in trouble.’”
As it turned out, Ms. Glyptis wasn’t in trouble. She was merely bored.
“I FaceTimed about 25 people that day,” she said. “Only two of them got back to me, my mom and John Damianos.”
Ms. Glyptis, 25, a retail consultant in Secaucus, N.J., for Ashley Stewart, and Mr. Damianos, also 25, met at Dartmouth in September 2013, when she was a freshman and he a sophomore. (Mr. Damianos, an incoming internal medicine resident at Yale, is to receive a medical degree from Dartmouth in June.)
Mr. Damianos was also the president of the Hellenic Society and Orthodox Christian Fellowship. When Ms. Glyptis responded to an email from Mr. Damianos, welcoming all the freshmen to Dartmouth, they decided to have lunch together at the campus dining hall.
They hit it off spectacularly and spoke for hours until they were told by dining hall staff that they had to leave because it was closing time.
Mr. Damianos later texted to a friend, “I want to marry this girl,” Ms. Glyptis called her mother to say she had met a “nice Greek boy, but thought he talked too much.”
They became friends, and Mr. Damianos, smitten from the start, tried several times to steer Ms. Glyptis in a romantic direction, but she refused to change course.
“I was very focused on my schoolwork and a relationship was not something I was interested in at that time,” she said. “He kept asking me out, and I kept telling him that I didn’t want to go down that path and stray from my studies.”
“There were hurt feelings on both sides, which I understood,” she added, “and we didn’t speak to each other for two years until I called him from Copenhagen.”
They stayed in constant touch, and began dating again, which pleased their parents.
Ms. Glyptis is a daughter of Maria and George Glyptis of Seven Hills, Ohio. Her parents are the owners of the Gyro George restaurants in northeast Ohio.
Mr. Damianos is a son of Francine Damianos and Dr. Aristotle Damianos of North Hampton, N.H., whose father is a gastroenterologist at Atlantic Digestive Specialists in Portsmouth, N.H. His mother is a retired clinical nurse who specialized in hematology at the Mary Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H.
The couple were engaged on April 20, 2018, and set a date for “a big fat Greek wedding,” as Ms. Glyptis jokingly put it, for May 9, 2020. They managed to keep the date, but the coronavirus forced the couple to considerably scale down, from the 250 originally attendees to the nine guests that took part in the couple’s ceremony at Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Cleveland, where the bride grew up. The Rev. Thomas Drenen, a Greek Orthodox priest, performed the ceremony.
“Hopefully, we’ll still have that big fat Greek wedding that we had been dreaming about,” the bride said. “What’s most important now is to keep everyone healthy and safe until this virus finally goes away.”
