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RELEASED: Feb. 12, 2004
DANVILLE, KY—There are many places college students in love may go for a night on the town: the movies, a fancy restaurant, or a walk in the park.
Centre College students, however, occasionally may be found sneaking a kiss while standing on the College seal in front of Old Centre.
According to campus legend, a Centre couple that kisses on the seal will marry after graduation. The tradition has been for students to kiss at midnight while standing over the seal. And the seal gets plenty of traffic around Valentine's Day.
"It's just one of those traditions you learn of when you arrive on campus," says Sherri Rose, a senior from Fort Wayne, Ind.
She kissed her fiancé, fellow Centre senior John Burke of Paris, Ky., on the seal at midnight last summer.
They met their sophomore year and began dating after becoming friends.
"I'd hang out with John and his friends and listen to them play guitar," she says. "We also both played ultimate frisbee—great fun!"
Their relationship progressed and Burke visited his girlfriend when she studied abroad in Strasbourg, France, last year.
"The day he flew in we walked up the 300 steps of the twisting staircase to the top of Strasbourg Cathedral," Rose says. "He told me that he'd gotten me a present and pulled out a book of Shakespeare's Sonnets. He read one to me and then flipped the book around, and inside he'd cut a hole for the engagement ring to fit in. With us being nervous, things didn't go exactly as planned and the ring fell out of the book. But luckily it didn't fall off the top of the cathedral. So he picked it up, stayed on one knee and proposed to me. It was certainly romantic."
They are to wed in Danville on June 26. They plan to attend the same graduate school, where Rose will study French and Burke physics. Rose is majoring in French at Centre, while Burke is majoring in physics with a minor in math.
It's not uncommon for Centre students to tie the knot. According to recent research by Beau Weston, associate professor of sociology at the College, there are 780 married alumni couples. That means 1,560 individuals out of 10,840 living alumni marry a fellow Centre student—more than one in every seven alumni.
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