VCU news

By Sian Wilkerson

On a sunny summer day in 2013, Samuel Dobbs, then a third-year anthropology major at Virginia Commonwealth University, was walking down Grove Avenue near VCU’s Monroe Park Campus when he was stopped in his tracks by the sight of Paige Dossett studying outside of her apartment building.

At the time, Dobbs didn’t know who Dossett was. He just knew he had to talk to her.

“Like a typical VCU hipster millennial kid, she was sitting on the stone steps cross-legged, looking far too cute for what she was doing, which was absolutely nothing,” he recalled. “I thought I would be bold and introduce myself.”

Although she had just broken up with someone and was “very much in my ‘No Boy’ era,” Dossett, a religious studies major, decided to see where the conversation went. After all, Dobbs, who grew up in New Zealand, “was cute and had an accent,” she said. “Why not?”

As they spoke, she mentioned that she was a regular at Cary Street Gym’s sunrise yoga class. Dobbs told her he went to the same class and asked if she wanted to attend it together. Dossett agreed, although she was slightly skeptical since she didn’t recall seeing him there      before. Early the next morning they walked to class together.

“I didn’t know anything about yoga,” said Dobbs, 12 years after that fateful meeting. “I’d never done yoga and I was a rugby player, so I was very inflexible. The last thing I would do was yoga.”

He admitted it was an “excruciating” session. And Dossett came away with an inkling that Dobbs had played up his history with yoga when he “left his socks on,” she said. “I was like, ‘Who leaves their socks on?’” But the blunder didn’t stop her from getting coffee with him afterward, and the rest was history.

More than a decade later, they’re still going strong.

After marrying in 2016, Dobbs and Dossett moved to the Caribbean, where Dobbs attended medical school. They eventually came back to the U.S. and are now living in Newport News with their two dogs, Rom and Tui. Dobbs is a physician and Dossett is the operations and fiscal coordinator at the College of William & Mary’s Entrepreneurship Hub.

Their ties to Richmond remain strong. The couple continue to make the trip up Interstate 64 to eat at their favorite restaurants and meet up with friends “as often as we can,” Dossett said. And memories of VCU are just as fond.

“For me, at least, it was the perfect situation for me to develop independence,” Dobbs said.

Dossett agreed: “I got to really figure out what I wanted to be and what I wanted to do with my life,” she said. “It felt very open and you could do what you wanted, and everybody was trying everything. And it was a kind of halcyon time.”

In addition to meeting each other, they were also able to meet others at VCU who have continued to be their closest friends today, which Dossett called “a real blessing.”

“If it weren’t for VCU, that wouldn’t have happened,” she said.

Looking back, Dossett is grateful that she made the split-second decision to give Dobbs a chance.

“Be open to all of the possibilities,” she said. “You don’t know where they might take you.”