“I almost didn’t think I was going to go through with it with the wedding party there — I was scared, I was really scared,” Latunski said. “I wasn’t scared she wouldn’t say, ‘Yes,’ but it was scary.”

With the wedding party looking on, Latunski pulled out a small ring box and knelt in front of Pfotenhauer, as the bridesmaids and groomsmen exploded with cheers of encouragement and the new bride-to-be nodded her head and began tearing up.

“I was excited, I was surprised — I really didn’t think he was going to (propose) that day,” Pfotenhauer said.

After months of planning and sneaking around, Latunski finally had popped the question he’d been waiting to ask the woman he’d loved for the last 15 years. The couple joined the legion of Spartans who have found not only an education, but the loves of their lives at MSU.

“Every day we’re hearing about different kinds of (MSU) relationships,” said Laurie Robison, the director of marketing and media relations for the MSU Alumni Association.

“The biggest things they’ll say is ‘I love the university, it’s a big part of my life, I met my wife here, I met my husband here,’ and then it kind of goes on and on, so that’s a very common phenomenon for us.”

Meeting on campus

There are outlets on and around campus that naturally cause people to connect and come together, Robison said.

After meeting a man he hit it off with at a concert at Breslin Center, Kent Love, director of communications for Wharton Center, said he remembered thinking he would have liked the opportunity to get to know the man better as he left Breslin Center following the show.

However, after bumping into each other later that night and still not exchanging digits, Love decided to take matters into his own hands.

“I went to the hotel and found his car,” Love said.

“It was raining, so I put my name and number in a Ziploc bag I happened to have in my car and put it on his windshield. I was leaving church the next day, and had a voicemail saying he appreciated getting to know me and the next week we had our first date … and the rest, as they say, is history.”

Although all MSU love stories might not start with grand gestures, MSU provides outlets all over campus for potential couples to meet, and Love said without the concert he might never have met his partner.

MSU alumna Jana Lemenu said the Green and White connection allowed her and her partner to have a special bond.

“Because she was so involved in … school, she didn’t have a lot of time to experience campus, and meeting an alumni made it a little different because we’ve gotten to experience all the things on campus together,” Lemenu said.

Generations of relations

Janis Hall followed in her mother’s footsteps in finding her husband through Greek Life in East Lansing.

Her mother, Patricia Emmenecker, was in a sorority and said she occasionally spent time with the fraternity boys in a close-by house where she ultimately would meet her husband.

“Anytime I went any place, I walked by their house, and at some point, my husband was out on the porch and started talking to me,” Emmenecker said.

“This was in the spring, and I kind of half-knew him from getting together with these guys for coffee, and then he asked me out. It turned out our sorority had had an exchange dinner with (his fraternity) in the fall and we were like, ‘Were you there?’ and it turns out we were sitting at the same table and neither one of us remembered each other.”

Emmenecker’s daughter, however, remembers exactly how she and her husband of now 25 years met.
Janis Hall said she met her future husband, John Hall, after his fraternity and her sorority set them up at a party.

The pair hit it off, realizing afterward they were both from Saginaw, Mich., and went to different high schools.

“We went home that summer and just continued dating and it went on and on and on from there,” Janis Hall said.

Janis Hall and Emmenecker, said they still are in contact with many of the people from their sorority days, and said many of them married an MSU alumnus as well.

“I got to know a lot of his fraternity brothers very well, and of course a lot of them married girls from Michigan State,” Emmenecker said.

Making it official

Many Spartans don’t stop at meeting on campus and decide to let MSU continue to be a part of their relationships for years to come.

Although some might choose to let MSU physically be in their relationship’s future, others can’t imagine it being emotionally absent from their life and love.

MSU alumna Andrea Kovac, who is engaged to fellow MSU alumnus Andrew Poole, said she can’t imagine her life with anyone but a Spartan.

“I think it’s fun having somebody in your life who enjoys the same things as you do, and a big part of that is MSU,” Kovac said.

“I can’t imagine marrying somebody who doesn’t love MSU — it would be weird.”

For Pfotenhauer and Latunski, the MSU connection will forever be what brought them back together after meeting early in their teen years.

Latunski said he lends credit to MSU for getting them back together.

“Truthfully, if we hadn’t both gone to MSU, I don’t know where we would be today,” he said.