Natalie Venuto Hawkins and Grant Hawkins met for the first time at The State News end of the year banquet in spring 2008.
“We were inseparable the whole night, but then I ran away at the end of the night — pre Uber when you ran home by yourself,” Natalie said.
Grant only knew her first name, so he looked up her name at work and then found her on Facebook.
They became friends, but didn’t start dating right away, Grant said.
At one point, Grant’s boss made him cut everybody’s hours, and Natalie stopped talking to him for a while after that, she said.
But, in the end it didn’t matter, because it was “love at first sight,” Natalie said with a laugh.
“We just hit it off immediately, right away. It was weird. I had a few girlfriends throughout college … it was different,” Grant said. “It felt right, it felt normal, it was easy.”
When Grant moved to Los Angeles in 2009 for a job, they took a break but still talked every day, Natalie said.
They both had desktop computers and they never disconnected their Skype call while he was in Los Angeles and she continued school, so it was a live stream of each other’s apartments, Grant said.
“It was almost like we lived together before we lived together,” Grant said.
Grant moved from Los Angeles to Detroit for a job and after he graduated, then Natalie started working there, too.
But, she said she knew she wanted to live in California after visiting Grant while he was there.
“You came back and I was like, ‘whatever, I still want to live there,’” Natalie said.
She was recruited by a start-up and moved to San Francisco for the job in 2012. After a year, Grant joined her.
They moved back to Michigan in August 2017 and were married in September 2017.
“We’ve been married a long time – four months – so it’s going great,” Natalie said.
They credit The State News with bringing them together through shared experiences.
“We were ambitious already, but we bonded over the experiences we were having here,” Natalie said.
In the almost 10 years since they met, they have had a lot of adventures, including multiple cross country drives and driving all but six hours of the west coast.
“We’ve lived a lot of different lives together since this place,” Natalie said.
The State News didn’t just bring them together, it also created a lot of friendships that are still around, they said.
“(In college) we were just a bunch of idiots going over to my apartment and making margaritas with snow,” Grant said. “Seeing how we’ve all grown and all stayed close over the years is pretty crazy.”
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