Stephanie Sawlit & John Hastrup

“It was a typical Hastrup proposal,” says the future Mrs. Hastrup.

Running with her fiancé through a state park near her home in Easton, Mass., Stephanie L. Sawlit ’07 was sure he was going to pop the question that day—she just wasn’t sure when. The picturesque woodland setting seemed appropriate, but they returned to Sawlit’s house sans ring.

That evening, at a dinner to celebrate her mother’s birthday, Sawlit, sitting next to John W. Hastrup ’06, could feel the rectangular ring box in his pocket. It wasn’t until they were back at her house, in her bedroom, that he got on one knee.

“If I’d had to wait any longer…” Sawlit says, trailing off.

Hastrup finishes the sentence for her. “She would’ve said no.”

But of course for Hastrup and Sawlit, who have been close since they first met during her pre-frosh weekend, their June 22 wedding in Foxborough, Mass., might just have been inevitable.

Hastrup, a Fresno, Calif., native, had been smitten by the then-high school senior Sawlit ever since her appearance at a swim team party his freshman year at Harvard. “I saw her walk in the door…not exactly love at first sight,” he jokes, “but I definitely thought she was really hot.” While her friends were prom dress shopping, Sawlit was heading up to Cambridge during her last semester of high school to visit her new beau.

And again, as fate would have it, Sawlit, after transferring from Pforzheimer to Dunster, was placed in the same entryway as Hastrup and just a few floors below her future fiancé’s suite.

Hastrup, of course, was a bold suitor. “Every time he would walk up he would bang on the door,” says Sawlit, and the two would often stay up writing papers and talking until the wee hours.

After their relationship became more serious, their roommates predicted that wedding bells were a foregone conclusion. Sawlit’s friends told her that she was going to be the perfect wife, and even Hastrup, just a few months into their courtship, told her outright that they would definitely be wed.

Hastrup, who graduated last spring, headed back to his home state for law school at the University of California, Berkeley, but his engagement, combined with discount fares from JetBlue, kept the couple in close contact during Sawlit’s senior year. “If we were going to be engaged,” says Sawlit of their yearlong separation, “we weren’t going to let anything break us apart after that.”

Though they will finally be together again after the wedding, their Bay Area apartment will only have one occupant for most of the summer. Sawlit will find herself in Long Beach, Calif. training to be an elementary school teacher with Teach for America in Oakland in the fall. Indeed, the turnaround will be quick. They will be married on a Friday, fly out to California at 8 a.m. on Saturday morning, and “honeymoon for two days,” says Sawlit, who then has to show up for orientation at 6 a.m. that Monday.

Not to be outdone by separation again, though, Hastrup has already bought weekend tickets to fly down to Long Beach throughout the summer before the couple finally settles in to their Oakland apartment.

In the meantime, the couple, their wedding planner, and Sawlit’s mom are all preparing for the big day. Sawlit says that she hasn’t been sweating the details, leaving most of the little stuff to her mother.

“If you tear your stockings there’s an extra pair in the bathroom,” Sawlit says of her mom’s perfectionist plans for the wedding.

But Hastrup and Sawlit have been trying to take it easy before their wedding, and with all the luck they’ve had already, it seems that a summer wedding will be a piece of cake.­

—Staff writer Stephen M. Fee can be reached at sfee@fas.harvard.edu.