From Towson, With Love
At TU, thousands of romances, like the one between Matt ’12 and Charlotte ’14 Sikorski have blossomed in dorm rooms, dining halls and at dance parties—no swiping right necessary.
Charlotte’s Story
I visited Towson as a high schooler; it must have been around 2009.
I took a tour, and there was a Q&A panel with current students after. Matt was on that panel. He was charming, very cute and made everyone laugh, so I instantly had a crush on him.
But I had to apply to the school and get in, so it was years before I actually met him. We both ended up joining student government. I was a senator sophomore year, and he was president his senior year. We became really good friends, but we were both dating other people. He went on to grad school, and I moved to Colorado. We stayed in touch maybe once or twice a year.
Then we both became single. He lived in Nashville, so we started dating long distance for like six months beginning in 2015. The day we sat down and confessed everything, we were at a Taiwanese boba tea place in Colorado. That’s when we say everything changed.
He moved to D.C., and we ended up living together for a couple of years in Bethesda, Maryland. I was a Latin American studies major and had a lifelong dream to take a trip to South America, so in 2017, we quit our jobs, put everything in storage and spent six months backpacking in South America.
When he proposed, he made a scavenger hunt. He sent me around the neighborhood in San Diego where we lived. One of the clues was in my favorite book in our local library. It ended with me coming back to the apartment and him on one knee. It was very cute, but I didn’t even have my nails done. If I had suspected it, I would have had a manicure.
We were supposed to get married in September 2020, but we decided to push it back a year because of COVID. We got married in San Diego, and it was officiated by Chris Rindosh, the student organizations coordinator at TU. He was the SGA adviser.
We went to Greece on our honeymoon. It was great—there was no one really there.
Matt’s Story
As gorgeous as I think she is, I don’t remember seeing her in the crowd back when I was on the panel. My first memory of meeting her is when I was elected student government president, and she was an SGA senator. Before you start the school year, you go on an SGA retreat where you meet everyone. We had four, 12-person vans that drove to the retreat. I drove one of them, and she was in my van, so whenever we went anywhere, I got to talk to her. She has orange hair, so whenever I looked in the rearview mirror, I spotted her.
We got to socialize a lot over the course of that school year. The first several years of our friendship, we were always dating other people, so we built a true friendship. I liked how she spent a lot of time in service to others. She helped in Haiti after the earthquake; she helped build a school in Nicaragua. She was just really interesting to be around.
For the proposal, I told her I had a scavenger hunt for her like our first anniversary, which wasn’t suspicious at all since I had done it before. I sent her around our neighborhood in San Diego so I’d have enough time to prepare for the actual proposal when she got back to the apartment. She says that she didn’t really know I was going to propose until the last clue. I’m pretty proud that I was able to still make it a surprise even though we’d already talked about getting engaged at some point in the near future.
I think knowing her as just a person for four years before anything turned romantic allowed me to gain a really good friend who has similar interests, similar goals in life and those sorts of things. That was the best foundation we could have possibly hoped for in our marriage. We both say this: If we had started dating in Towson when we first met, we’re not sure how things would have played out or whether we still would have gotten married. Our journey almost had to play out the way that it did for us to be where we’re at now.