Unbreakable bonds: After great first impressions, they needed a second-chance meeting

By Joan Tupponce

Steve Guilford can’t pinpoint the moment he fell in love with his now wife, Amanda.

He’s not sure if it was the time Amanda took a ferry and drove over an hour on back roads in the winter to stay with him at an old family cottage with no power. Or when the two got trapped in a blizzard on the way home from skiing in Vermont. Or when they fostered a neglected pit bull puppy while living 30 blocks away from each other.

What Steve does know is that he fell in love with “one of the coolest people I’ve met,” he said. “She had a nose piercing, longboard, was easy to talk to, kind and super cute.”

The two met twice before they began dating. The first time was during their sophomore year in 2005 at Virginia Commonwealth University, through an introduction facilitated by Steve’s roommate. Both were dating other people at the time, so they went their separate ways. But they didn’t forget each other.

“My first thoughts of Steve is that he was a genuinely nice guy, very real,” Amanda said. “I thought he would be a great boyfriend.”

The second time, they met serendipitously on campus in 2006. Amanda, a biology major, was sitting on a bench waiting for class in one of the life sciences buildings. Steve, an information systems major, was coming out of a class in the Temple Building. Neither was in a relationship at the time.

“He had parked his bike at the rack next to my bench,” Amanda said. “I told him to call me, and it took him over a week. I thought he wasn’t interested.”

But Steve was interested. The two began hanging out most weekends, and eventually decided to make their relationship exclusive in January 2007. By summer, Amanda realized she was falling in love.

“It was just so easy to be together,” she said. “I could be myself 100% from Day One.” 

Steve earned his degree in 2012, and Amanda earned hers in 2013. One of their most romantic moments occurred that year when Steve proposed at the picturesque Church Hill Overlook with its sweeping view of Richmond. It was just the two of them and their dog, Izea.

“Because my engagement ring is an heirloom from my family, Steve wanted to give me a symbolic ring of his own. As I opened a Pandora gift bag and saw the diamond ring charm inside, I looked up and realized he was down on one knee with the real one,” Amanda said.

They married in 2014 at the Omni Richmond Hotel. Now, 12 years later, Steve works at VCU as a senior digital developer, and Amanda, who worked as a quality and data coordinator for trauma and burn programs, is a stay-at-home mom, homeschooling the couple’s 8-year-old daughter, Emily.

“It’s a whole new world and ideology,” Amanda says of homeschooling. “It’s really cool.”

Both note how life now looks much different than it did when they first met.

“We weren’t even 21 years old. We were still trying to figure out what we were going to do with our lives, where we wanted to live and what was important. We were just babies,” Amanda said. “However, the most important and telling part of our love story is that through every life lesson, as an individual and as a couple, we have always grown together, never apart.”