As Valentine’s Day draws near, most people are left reflecting on their relationships, whether they want to or not. While some are left mystified at their mishaps in love, others realize how lucky they are to have someone to support and care for them. Syracuse University professors are no exception. What follows are a few of their stories.

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Despite being employees at a Borders Books & Music store in Maryland in 1999, Elizabeth and Raymond Wimer’s first date was dinner, and then a night spent at Barnes and Noble.

“We had to drive a while to get to the Barnes and Noble,” Raymond Wimer said. “We weren’t going to go to a Borders where people would recognize us.”

“Oh, and I had walking pneumonia,” Elizabeth Wimer chimed in. “So it was phlegmy, disgusting coughs over a romantic dinner.” They both broke out into laughter.

Now, the pair of Martin J. Whitman School of Management professors continue the trend when they leave their two young sons with a babysitter. They leave around 5 p.m., go to dinner, then head to Barnes and Noble for a little bit of browsing before going grocery shopping and calling it a night.

“We are the ideal parents for babysitters, we leave early and come home early so our babysitters have enough money and time to go out the rest of the night,” Elizabeth Wimer said.

When they met at Borders, Elizabeth was the café manager and Raymond was the marketing manager. The jobs helped both of them gain basic knowledge they needed to teach at SU: He is a marketing and retail professor, and she is a marketing and entrepreneurship professor.

They’re in agreement that there are many benefits to working at the same school, be it going to the gym together or bouncing ideas off one another for lectures.

Last fall, Elizabeth taught one of Raymond’s “signature classes,” and he gave her all of the materials. She said they were able to have great conversations about content they never would have been able to have before.

“If anything, our relationship benefits the students because I bring in a different energy than he does to the course,” Elizabeth Wimer said. “He has deep theory and deep content, and I add the context and together we build these dynamic classes.”

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There’s a common phrase that goes, “Do what you love, love what you do.” For some, this is a struggle, while for others like Graham Leuschke and Moira McDermott, living by this adage can lead to bumping into another person who happens to thrive on the same beliefs.

Leuschke and McDermott met at a math conference in January 1999. Now, they are both professors of mathematics at Syracuse University. To play off another cliché aphorism, “Some things are meant to be.”

After that initial conference, the duo stayed in touch over e-mail, and later that summer, met up again at another conference where they decided to start dating despite the long distance.

“We were long distance for nearly seven and a half years,” Leuschke said, gazing in the direction of McDermott.

“We mostly only saw each other at other math conferences,” McDermott replied to him, grinning.

The couple now lives just off the SU campus with their 8-year-old son.

“When he was first born, it was really crazy,” McDermott said. “We would balance our schedules so I would walk him in the stroller on my way to class and intersect with Graham who would be coming back from class and take him back home with him.”

Now that their son is older, it’s a little easier, but the couple still balances their time in class so someone can always be on call for their son.

“You know,” Leuschke said. “In case he breaks his leg or something.”

Even though having a young child and being two full-time professors can be exhausting, the two still like to make time to do things together.

“We don’t do research together — that just doesn’t work,” McDermott said. “And we’ve honestly been really bad about date nights lately, but when we do have time we like to find new restaurants or just talk about students and the department, maybe even more than we should.”

“We also Netflix,” Leuschke interjected quickly.

And when they get some time off, they like to travel. This past January they took a trip to Seattle, which happened to be hosting the same math conference they met at 17 years ago.

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Ramesh and Surabhi Raina teach two sections of the exact same biology course at SU, coming full circle from the time they took the exact same class at a university in India where they met.

“It’s both good and challenging, when you’re two bodies coming to the same institution,” Ramesh Raina said. “But, we knew we wanted to be in the same place, and now here we are.”

Surabhi Raina nodded and then upon a moment of reflection, added, “We see each other 24/7.” Ramesh caught her eye and smiled at this.

The couple was married in India in 1989. They agreed their wedding was perhaps one of their best memories of their time together, despite being a little hectic.

Soon after, with a one-month daughter in tow, they made the decision to head to Baltimore, where they could find “better science” and do their postdoctoral.

“Oh, that trip was also a memory, not sure if it was good or bad, but coming to America with an infant on three separate flights was a huge challenge for us,” Surabhi said.

After some time teaching biology at Penn State University, they were asked to come to SU and were promised that they would have a say in the design of the Life Sciences Complex under construction.

“It was a really attractive offer, and we would still be together,” Ramesh Raina said.

Now, the couple’s two children have moved out, their daughter having graduated with an economics degree and their son currently studying computer science. This gives them more time to stop for dinners after work or even drive to classes together.

Published on February 10, 2016 at 10:21 pm

Contact: ararcham@syr.edu