Janice Rude and Prentiss Willson were young when they fell in love at Occidental College in Los Angeles, she a sophomore, he a freshman. Like many campus romances, it began with routine moments that didn’t seem destined to become a defining story.
Prentiss still remembers the first time he saw Janice in the cafeteria. “I remember the first time I laid eyes on Janice…she was working the breakfast shift at the school cafeteria,” he said. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he needed to know her. So he started showing up early, very early, just to catch a few minutes with her before the day began.
Even with that pull toward her, Prentiss didn’t assume he had a chance. “She was a year ahead of me and just so beautiful,” he said. But what he didn’t realize was that Janice had noticed him, too.
That became clear around Thanksgiving. When Prentiss didn’t show up for the college’s pre-Thanksgiving dinner, Janice didn’t shrug it off. She asked around, tracked down where his family lived, and drove roughly 150 miles to Santa Maria on Thanksgiving Day to knock on his door. The visit caught his mother off guard at first, but the connection between them was hard to miss. Janice was welcomed in.
Prentiss later described how quickly his mother took to Janice, “just like I was,” he said. Not long after, the young couple got engaged. They even placed an announcement in the local newspaper, despite not having a wedding date set.
But the speed of their engagement left one major gap: Prentiss still hadn’t met Janice’s parents. When the time came to ask for her father’s blessing, the answer wasn’t just “no.” Janice’s father strongly opposed the relationship and warned that he would cut off her tuition and financial support if she didn’t end it.
The couple tried to resist the pressure and stay together anyway. “We tried to figure things out but I guess we weren’t smart enough,” Prentiss said. The reality was that Janice’s ability to finish college depended on financial support she didn’t have on her own.
Her mother tried to help, at one point even taking out a second mortgage, but it still wasn’t enough to offset the threat hanging over Janice’s education. Eventually, the pressure won. The engagement ended, not because they stopped loving each other, but because the cost of staying together felt impossible at the time.
Prentiss put it plainly: “We had to. We didn’t want to, but we had to.”
They moved forward into separate lives. Contact faded, and the relationship became something they carried privately, important, unfinished, but unreachable. Prentiss graduated and went on to Harvard Law School, building a successful career as an attorney. Janice completed college as well and later ran a pool business in Nevada. In time, both married other people.
Then, decades later, something unexpected happened, something that didn’t feel like coincidence to them.
Around the same period, both of their mothers passed away. As Prentiss sorted through his mother’s belongings, he found a newspaper clipping: the engagement announcement from long ago. Janice found the same kind of clipping among her mother’s things as well.
Prentiss put words to what the discovery suggested: “The mothers got it,” he said. “The mothers simply knew.”
What struck them was not just that the clippings existed, but that these keepsakes had been saved for decades, despite the mothers never having met. Janice’s mother had reportedly kept a laminated copy in her wallet for more than 35 years, holding onto a piece of the story even after life moved on.
Eventually, Janice and Prentiss decided to meet for lunch. What they found wasn’t awkwardness or distance, it was familiarity. The feeling they’d had in college returned with force, and they didn’t treat it like a nostalgic reunion. They treated it like a second chance.
At 69, they set a wedding date and finally married, nearly 50 years after that original engagement. They even used their old engagement announcement as the wedding invitation, turning the artifact of a heartbreak into a symbol of completion.
In reflecting on what they lost and what they regained, they didn’t pretend the years apart didn’t matter. They acknowledged them directly, saying, “We continue to lament every day that we missed being together, that’s about 17,500 days, but who’s counting?”
Their story has resonated because it’s not just romantic, it’s human. It holds both realities at once: the grief of what didn’t happen when they were young, and the gratitude of what finally did. In the end, the love they thought was gone wasn’t erased. It was delayed.
And when it returned, it didn’t come as a dramatic rescue or a perfect rewrite. It arrived quietly, through memory, through grief, and through two mothers who kept a small piece of hope tucked away for decades
Featured Image from Facebook: Janice Rude-Willson / Parentiss Willson