Dena & Shannon

San Francisco, CA

Dena, 24, student

Dena and Shannon met the old-fashioned way—at a bar. One Saturday night in December 2008, Shannon, a Baltimore native, had just flown in from a conference in Miami on the medicinal properties of bat spit. She was, of course, still wearing a bat-covered name tag, when she entered her local bar and caught the attention of science major Dena. The two aspiring doctors hit it off that night. “Her friends referred to me as ‘the bat spit girl’,” Shannon says. “In fact some (affectionately) still do. The night we met Dena had on a sushi shirt. She was/still is programmed in my phone as ‘Dena Sushi Shirt’.” The couple maintained a long-distance relationship before moving together to San Francisco, where they “flirt with each other all the time, go out on ‘official’ dates, have only one cat and no living house plants.”