The first time Chris and Gabi Vannini really interacted, they stood in Holden Hall’s lobby for an hour talking—while Gabi was on crutches.
They started working at The State News in late August 2008, but it wasn’t until October that they really talked, Chris said.
“He started coming back to my room in the evenings after work and we would watch T.V. and it just went from there,” Gabi said.
Chris swears the first time they interacted was at the bike rack outside The State News, but Gabi swears it wasn’t her.
He said she was wearing a certain shirt, but Gabi said there’s photographic evidence she was wearing a different shirt.
“It’s a made-up story,” Gabi said.
They didn’t start officially dating until March 2009, but their friends would still call them an “old married couple,” Gabi said.
“Everyone was like, ‘oh, Gabi and Chris are dating,’ and we weren’t,” Gabi said.
At a State News party in early March, people kept asking Chris if he and Gabi were dating, and eventually he got fed up with it and said yes.
Gabi was travelling for work, covering the women’s basketball tournament, so Chris called her after the party and told her what happened, and she just said, “OK,’ he said.
“We were there basically every day for a year. … It’s kind of hard not to get close with people you work with there,” Chris said.
They graduated in spring 2011 and got engaged the weekend after at Niagara Falls, but it wasn’t a surprise, because they had already booked the venue.
The venue they chose, the MSU Alumni Memorial Chapel, had to be booked 18 months in advance, Gabi said.
“MSU shaped our early lives and our relationship, so it was fitting to get married there,” Gabi said.
Now, Gabi does public relations for an animal shelter and Chris covers sports in Dallas for The Athletic, so they both have busy, often unpredictable schedules, Gabi said.
“We got adjusted pretty quickly to working around work, and that’s always been a big thing for us,” Gabi said. “I think that there’s a lot of people that probably would put up with neither of us in a relationship, but it works out because we both have similar priorities.
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