Under Upham Arch

I walk with my hands stuffed in my pockets, looking through my foggy breath to take in the autumnal oranges against the red bricks.
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People bundle against the cold, conversing and traversing the quad on their way to class, or to eat or do some other college thing.

The trees are mostly bare in Oxford by November of 2019, but some leaves still tumble gently to the ground as our tour guide brings us to a stop in a small gathering around the seal.

She warns us to avoid stepping on it, and advises us to go rub the turtles to the southeast if we do.

Then she turns and points to her right.

“That building is Upham Hall,” she says. She lowers her hand to a hollow space perforating the building. “If you kiss your true love at midnight under the Upham Arch, you’ll live happily ever after together.”

That’s news to me. I turn to my mom to ask, “When did you and dad kiss under the arch?”

She smiles, remembering. “I don’t think we ever did that.”

I laugh. She flew over 2,000 miles with me for a college visit at their alma mater, the place they met (and the reason, I suppose, that I exist), and my parents never even kissed under Upham Arch at midnight?

It’s not the most surprising thing to learn about their past. My dad claims he ran to stomp on the seal after his last exam, and in the years after graduating, my parents moved progressively farther and farther away from Oxford, stopping only when they made it all the way out to Portland, Oregon.

Still, my parents love Miami. They wear Miami t-shirts, drink out of Miami cups, and keep in touch with a lot of good friends they met here. As for kissing under the arch, I think their Miami experience alone made happily ever after easy enough.

***

A Miami Merger is the name for the simple, yet strangely prevalent, occurrence of two former RedHawks getting married to one another. Currently, around 14% of Miami alumni are Mergers. That’s 14,343 couples, and twice as many people.

As marriage goes, many Mergers had children, and quite a few of those Merger babies have found their way back to Oxford to live in the same dorms, sit in the same classrooms and walk the same streets as their parents.

My parents went on their first date at Skipper’s Pub in 1994, after years of knowing each other. They ate sandwiches and shared a basket of waffle fries with cheese sauce. 

Their persevering connection to Miami was strong enough for me to check it out online, then apply, and visit, and visit again, then commit to flying over 2,000 miles at the beginning and end of every semester.

And now, I can’t imagine myself anywhere else. I’ve found hobbies, joined student organizations, and it seems like I’m on track to graduate. I’ve met friends — and my girlfriend, Megan.

Yes, it’s going pretty well, thank you. 

We both like coffee quite a bit; that ended up being a good place to start. But I’m only 20 years old. She’s 19. “Merging” isn’t really on our radar. But who’s to say whether coffee will be our waffle fries?

Marriage in the U.S. is on the decline, and people are pushing it later into their lives — long past their college years. The national trend, and the modern mechanics of dating, could affect Miami’s Merger statistics.

Senior Andy Riggs doesn’t think the outlook is too good.

“I think our generation is a little different,” Riggs said. “Social norm-wise, I don’t think our generation is going to get married until 28ish, 30ish.”

His parents met at Miami, and so did his dad’s parents, but that isn’t pushing him to follow the same path. He said he’s not living in the same climate for marriage that his parents were when they attended.

“My parents, they got married … like a year after they graduated,” Riggs said. “For me, I’m graduating in May. If I [get] married when they did, it [would] be a year from June.”

That sounds too soon to Riggs. 

The only pressure comes from the teasing; Riggs met his current girlfriend at the same time his parents met each other: second semester of junior year. That draws a suggestive comment every once in a while.

Grace Klebe knows what the teasing is like.

She does Riggs one better on the family line: her parents, grandparents, and also an aunt and uncle are all Mergers. Even freakier, they all met their spouses during the first half of their second year. When they all took her to dinner at the start of the semester, they didn’t let the sophomore Klebe ignore it.

“I was like, ‘You can all shut up right now,’” Klebe said, laughing.

For Klebe, whose parents hang a “Miami Merger” sign in their living room and kissed under the arch, the Merger branding doesn’t push her to find someone to get hitched to.

“It’s more of a joke,” she said. “When one of my friends meets a guy, we’ll say, like, ‘I’m gonna take him to Upham.’”

The discussion of Mergers provides a subject of entertainment rather than encouragement for future planning.

***

And there’s something else threatening the Merger brand: long-distance relationships.

Josh Elkowitz’s parents met playing volleyball on a beach in Florida, then returned from spring break to Miami, where their relationship would grow into a Merger.

Elkowitz first went out with his girlfriend at a high school dance in Vienna, Virginia, from whence they split to schools more than 500 miles apart.

They’ve kept their flame alive mostly through FaceTime, and the sophomore Elkowitz has visited her at Syracuse a few times, and hosted a visit himself. FaceTime is only one of a plethora of social media apps that can keep couples connected across space. It’s technology like this that’s made long-distance relationships more common, and maybe more achievable, but it’s still not the same as being together. Maybe that’s why Riggs doesn’t think the Merger future is too bright.

But my parents did the long-distance thing, too.

My dad graduated and moved to Chicago a month after they began dating. They stuck it out through a year between Chicago and Oxford, while my mom was still at Miami, then Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin, when my mom began work on her master’s degree. They took turns driving three hours to spend weekends together.

They were married in 1997 and spent 19 years raising another RedHawk.

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I think that’s what our tour guide had in mind when she said “happily ever after.”