Read more from The Big Day, The Boston Globe’s new weddings column.
In August 2013, Rachel Dillon and Jackson Tuck were freshmen, moving into the same floor in Usen Hall at Waltham’s Brandeis University.
Rachel, a social butterfly and a creative writing-English literature double major from Arlington, covered her extra-long twin bed with a green paisley quilt, and hung prints by Frank Lloyd Wright and Hokusai on the walls, alongside stacks of books.
Meanwhile, Jackson, “came in with my black quilt, my one pillow, and my Xbox,” he says.
He was from New York City, studying health policy and psychology, and though his room’s walls were bare, his door was always open — literally — because his outgoing, friendly roommate had volunteered them to be the demo dorm for prospective freshmen tours. “We were polar opposites,” Jackson explains.
But the open-door policy soon extended to their neighbors, including Rachel, who began adding colorful drawings of the roommates and pages from a Peanuts coloring book to Jackson’s blank walls. They formed a close friendship, bonding over their love for music and visual art. Jackson, whose mother is a choreographer and arts educator, would visit Rachel while she was working as a student gallery guard at the university’s Rose Art Museum.
“[He] had an appreciation for the museum in a way that other folks maybe didn’t,” Rachel remembers.
The kinship was a source of comfort and consistency for the two freshmen finding their footing. According to them, it was platonic, limited to late-night homework, dorm pranks, and Snapchat sprees. “I think the people around us from the start had a sense that we were into each other, but we didn’t prioritize [romance]” at first, she explains.
Jackson’s friends teased him when they spotted Rachel’s photo as the wallpaper of his phone. (It had been a joke — she set it herself.) Rachel chalked a mural on Jackson’s wall as a surprise while he was home for Thanksgiving break. Knowing he was a fan of “good handwriting,” in particular, hers, she artfully wrote his name in neon green.
“He didn’t tell me until a few years later that he ended up getting a massive fine from the dorms because it wouldn’t come off,” she says.
“It looked great,” he adds, “but it cost me $400.”
By spring, their feelings began to evolve. The pair watched late-night movies together in their rooms and took walks around campus, chatting and roving until 3 a.m., each wondering if the other might make a move.
“It was multiple nights of us, being almost like in a movie — where you’re lying face-to-face, a couple inches apart, but we didn’t actually do the kiss part," says Jackson. He attributes the hesitation to his nerves, “but also the ramifications” of going beyond just friends, he explains. “It was just a big unsaid thing both of us were aware of.”
But after attending Jackson’s fraternity formal together in April, they shared a 3 a.m. first kiss under a blanket fort in his dorm’s empty common room — and then immediately went their separate ways. “We were both like, ‘Yeah, we can talk about this later, but thank God it happened,’” says Rachel with a laugh.
Making it “official” took a few months. It wasn’t until after they returned to campus that fall that Jackson asked: “Will you go out with me?” — “formally,” he explains.
“Granted, it was confusing, because in her mind, it was like, ‘Wait, weren’t we already doing that?’” he says with a laugh. Their official first date was to the Boston Aquarium.
The following summer, Rachel interned with Writopia Lab’s New York-based creative-writing nonprofit for kids. Jackson, who moved home for summer and found work as a mover, suggested she stay with his family.
He welcomed her into his New York fold, which included family dinners and meeting his friends from high school. “His family felt like my family right away,” she says. Rachel and Jackson’s father are both early risers and would enjoy coffee and chats while the rest of the house was still asleep.
While the couple acknowledge it was “early,” both for their ages and relationship stage, they say their confidence in their ability to cohabitate — whether it be a shared apartment, shared family, or shared life — was born from this trial period.
“We got to know each other as roommates for the first time, and as part of [his] family,” says Rachel. “It’s how we picked up on each other’s habits — just eating or sleeping, the day-to-day stuff."
After graduation in 2017, they made New York their home — at first living separately, then together in 2020. Rachel taught ninth-grade English and Jackson job hunted and worked as a mover and in health care PR until he eventually joined Weber Shandwick, where he is currently a director.
“[She] would continue to support me when I was having a hard time finding a job,” Jackson says of that time, “or I would be supporting [her] when [she] was having a hard time with the transition to teaching.”
They moved again in 2022, after Rachel was accepted into Boston University’s MFA program for poetry. They settled into their now-Fenway home with their cat, Frida. (Rachel found her as part of a litter of stray kittens in the Bronx Botanical Gardens.)
They’d discussed marriage since college — at first, a dream, but then a more realistic conversation. In September 2023, Jackson proposed at Lago di Braies in the Dolomites, Italy, where Rachel had been completing her thesis on a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. Jackson got down on one knee in a rowboat in the center of the lake, and asked if she’d be his “best friend forever,” and then if she’d take the ring before the boat tipped over.
Rachel and Jackson, now both 30, wed Aug. 2 at Timber Hill Farms in Gilford, N.H., with 102 guests. Jackson’s father, Andrew Tuck, officiated.
The decision to incorporate his father was inspired by a “RadioLab” episode Jackson heard as they were planning. A guest shared a regret that their own father had died before he could officiate their wedding.
“And I thought, ‘This is the only time I’m going to get married,’” remembers Jackson, ‘so this is the only opportunity to have someone in my life play such an important role in our marriage.’"
The wedding celebration included sentimental touches — cocktail napkins imprinted with some of their love notes, and lavender tucked into Rachel’s hair, the signature drinks, and bouquets, a nod to her time volunteering on a lavender farm in Italy, where they had gotten engaged. As a tribute to Jackson’s late childhood friend, Mark Ronan, his groomsmen passed a vase of fresh flowers between them and took photos of the vase with guests throughout the night, leaving the results with the couple as a next-day surprise.
Rachel, now the managing editor at Ploughshares, a literary journal housed at Emerson College, read from Franz Wright’s “The Poem”: “There is a life which, if I could have it, I would have chosen for myself from the beginning.”
As a poet herself, she doesn’t identify as one who writes about love. Still, she muses that her work often features the first person plural.
The “we” she believes to be herself and Jackson.
“There is no ‘me’ without that ‘we,’” she says, “in writing and in life.”
Read more from The Big Day, The Boston Globe’s new weddings column.
Rachel Kim Raczka is a writer and editor in Boston. She can be reached at rachel.raczka@globe.com.