Elizabeth Yates '06

Photo by Daily Princetonian Staff

After turning in their theses, most seniors take a few days — or weeks — off from work. You see them running through fountains, playing football outside Dod, at the Street on Monday nights. But for Elizabeth Yates '06, the next few months will be some of the busiest of her life. She is getting married in June.

"It's been really busy," she said. "But it's fun stuff. Everyone has a [means of] procrastination. Mine is fixing my wedding registry."

Though she attended the same New Hampshire boarding school as Charles Scribner '05, the two did not know each other well till Yates came to Princeton. "It was one of those things where you're walking by the person you're going to marry every day, and you never know it," she said. Since Yates is from the Alabama, where "we have dates to football games," Scribner asked Yates to a Princeton-Lafayette game her sophomore year. After Princeton lost, the two commiserated at Cottage, the club Yates would later join and where Scribner was already a member. "We clicked immediately," she said.

From there, "things went really fast." The day after the game, Scribner asked Yates to be his girlfriend; two months later he asked her to marry him. The official engagement took place last summer, when Scribner proposed in a church garden in Alabama. Yates accepted in front of a crowd of cheering onlookers.

"I credit Princeton a lot for this relationship," Yates said. While she may not have had the most typical undergraduate experience, she insisted that she does not "feel that weird" about how her relationship developed. "[In] most relationships, you date for a while, have 'the talk' and then decide to date exclusively, but we hit it off immediately."

Yates had to balance a long-distance engagement, thesis-writing with planning her wedding during her final year in a dorm room, but she has only positive things to say about the experience. "Being engaged at Princeton is the best way to do it," she said. "You get to spend time with friends before you enter married life. The way I navigated, it worked."

Her style of navigation involved frequent visits from Scribner, gradual decision-making regarding the wedding and a lot of time with friends, two of whom will be in the wedding. Yates does not see this year as all that different from her previous ones in college — "I think we were already labeled as 'going to get married.' I don't think it came as much of a surprise."

Her calmness also derives in large part from her fiance's composure. "Most of the bickering has been between me and my mother. Charlie's just like, 'Whatever, you pick.' " Yates said that Scribner helped a great deal with wedding preparations, however, and their common interests made some choices fall easily into place. Because both Yates and Scribner are staunch environmentalists, they plan to honeymoon by taking a road trip in Scribner's Toyota Prius, a hybrid car. They will drive to a blackberry farm in Tennessee, where they hope to do a lot of hiking and fishing.

Yates expressed no apprehension about married life, discussing it with the same tone of excitement she uses when describing the proposal. She and Scribner have purchased a house in Alabama, where they plan to live for several years while Scribner works as director of development for the Black Warrior Riverkeeper, an environmental agency. Yates will spend next year starting a museum for a local artist, after which she may go to law school.

Scribner has spent the past year getting used to Southern life. "We couldn't be more different in terms of background," Yates said. "He's one of two boys [in a family] from New York, and I'm one of four girls from Alabama." But after graduating, Scribner moved to Yates' home state. Now, she says, "He's more Southern I am. He shot his own buck, and he loves beer."

Until Yates finishes school, the two will have to continue trading stories over the phone and through email, which Yates admits is "definitely hard." But because she keeps busy, Yates has had little time to let the distance between her and her fiance get to her. Organizing gifts, selecting readings, determining registrees and finding addresses are just some of the activities that a future bride has to think about.

"I'm busier now than I was before I finished my thesis," she said. But she cannot wait to get married and be a wife. Added Yates, with anticipation in her voice, "We still have a lot to learn from each other."