For a few short days before Valentine’s Day, campus transforms. Bruno walks through the Blue Room handing out roses and paper-cut hearts adorn the building windows. One word enters many people’s minds: love.

Although the holiday is most often a celebration of romance, there is also another love to be celebrated: friendship. The Herald spoke to Brown students and faculty about what platonic love looks like for them.

‘A homey place’: Emily Hipchen MA’20, Jonathan Readey and Ravit Reichman

Emily Hipchen MA’20, Jonathan Readey and Ravit Reichman, in addition to their positions as English professors, are also proud members of the “Without a Paddle Club,” which started during the pandemic.

The three-membered club gathered virtually every Wednesday night to indulge in an episode of Schitt’s Creek, despite the physical isolation.

Of the dynamic trio, Reichman was the first to arrive at Brown in 2003, followed by Readey in 2009. Readey says that Reichman was one of the first people he had met at Brown, adding that she was “so friendly” and made Brown feel like “a homey place.”

Reichman and Readey had a lot in common — they were both trained in modernist literature and had offices on the same hallway, Midwestern roots, kids around the same age and an hour commute from Massachusetts — but their close friendship blossomed when they began to teach together.

As the director of graduate studies for the Department of English at the time, Reichman asked Readey to co-teach the pedagogy class he had historically taught.

“It was awesome because you learn a lot about a person when you’re teaching with them,” Reichman said. “You see what lights them up in that context, what they care about, how they think with others.”

Last summer, Readey and Reichman continued the tradition and co-taught a summer course in London. The course was both online and in-person in London, and the two “basically lived with (their) students in a dorm in London for three weeks,” Reichman said. “It was amazing.”

Hipchen, the newest addition to the trio, recalled visiting Readey’s sports writing class in 2020, where she found herself amazed by Readey’s class of excited students and fervent discussion.

It began to snow as she left, and Readey insisted to Hipchen that the weather in Providence was usually nicer. It was “a very (Readey) thing to say, because, frankly, it’s not,” Hipchen added. Even in the cold, Hipchen remembers Readey as the “most warm, most friendly, most accepting and facilitating person (she has) literally ever met.”

Their friendship is not confined to the boundaries on campus. Readey once participated in a flash mob for Reichman’s son’s Bar Mitzvah, dancing to a song with rewritten words from “Carrying the Banner” from the musical “Newsies.”

During the pandemic, Hipchen sat on a call with Readey for hours, helping him browse for cars on Carvana, an online used car retailer. They settled on the “silver surfer,” his now beloved Honda CRV.

The trio also cultivates community beyond themselves.

Readey said that Hipchen is “always looking for ways to build community, not just with our friendship — the three of us — but with so many people across the department, across Brown, and the same thing for Ravit.”

In the aftermath of the Dec. 13 mass shooting, Reichman brought hot chocolate and cookies to the English department’s lounge as the trio, joined by Hipchen’s dog Darby, gathered to provide a space for students.

“I felt like, you know, it was going to be okay, even if it wasn’t going to be okay because of the way in which we could meet that moment in that particular way,” Hipchen said.

To Reichman, a good friend is someone who you can be “very real” with. “I feel like myself around them, and I feel like I can be vulnerable around them,” she said. “These are the people who show up for you,” Reichman said.

“Life isn’t the office,” Reichman said, but “I feel lucky to work with people I love, and I don’t take that for granted for a second.”

The matching ‘Bob Dylan jacket’: Grace Gongoleski ’27 and Lydia Fantaye ’27

Grace Gongoleski ’27 and Lydia Fantaye ’27 met in the hubbub of their first semester, as many friends do, but didn’t speak one-on-one until their second semester, when their mutual friend reintroduced them in line at Andrews.

“I remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, she’s so lit to talk to,’” Gongoleski said. “I just felt like we really kind of clicked.”

They chatted about class — at the time, they both thought they were studying biomedical engineering. Since then, they’ve both switched to applied mathematics-biology.

The two found camaraderie in shared coursework. “It was easier to continue, I was like ‘Okay, somebody else is doing this,’” Fantaye said.

During sophomore year, “I feel like we ended up doing a lot of things together,” Fantaye said. “I couldn’t imagine doing them without her.”

They bonded over their shared music taste — Fantaye is a big fan of Bob Dylan, and Gongoleski is a big fan of Jeff Buckley. Togther, they saw Bob Dylan in concert and went up to Boston to see a documentary about Jeff Buckley on the big screen.

Gongoleski has a tan corduroy jacket she calls her “Bob Dylan jacket,” and Fantaye, after asking Gongoleski first, got a matching one. They have multiple identical pieces of clothing — one day, they ran into one another and found themselves wearing the same outfit.

Together, they have also planned a hypothetical band. One of their potential song names, “Stop and Listen to the Windmills,” calls to a summer drive through Johnston where the two indulged in shared music and windmills as they passed by.

Besides music tastes, their vocabulary has melded together as well. “Don’t fret,” a favorite phrase of Fantaye’s, has been adopted into Gongoleski’s daily speech.

This year, they’re not only roommates, but bunkmates as well. Although the plan to bunk their beds started out as a joke, the two got pins from the Office of Residential Life and stacked their beds. A top bunker all her life, Gongoleski fit well with Fantaye, who chose the bottom for fear of falling.

The pair will be living together again next year and hope to attend many more concerts together in the future.

“I’m so grateful that we met each other,” Gongoleski said.

‘Telepathically’ connected: Dylan Lai ’27 and Karen Chien ’27

Dylan Lai ’27 and Karen Chien ’27 met during their first week of Brown classes in the Petteruti lounge.

Chien was working on a problem set with one of their mutual friends. Lai remembered thinking that she was “really studious,” but they didn’t speak until a group Ivy Room dinner a short while later.

They met again in Keeney Quadrange, where they both lived their first year. Lai often walked around the quad between Everett-Poland and Archibald-Bronson at night, and one evening Chien happened to join him. They then walked to the Arnold lounge, a room that would come to host many late night chats.

After that, they started to do homework together — they both study biomedical engineering and have most of the same classes — and get meals together. They found similarities with each other, from their upbringings to their sense of humor. One day when Chien skipped lunch one day, Lai also happened to skip lunch.

“We had every meal together, so much so that when I skipped a meal I was pretty certain that we both did,” Chien added.

Their friendship returned to Keeney as well: They bought plants together at a flea market by the Providence river, and Chien would sit outside in the quad so that her plant — which she called Lana, named for their shared favorite artist, Lana Del Ray — could get sunlight. .

The two now live in the same suite after living in the same building as each other for the past two years. They now know one other so well that they can “telepathically” tell when something irks the other. For example, in a situation where they encountered themselves behind slow walkers, they looked over at each other in sync: “We knew exactly the frustration that we were feeling,” Chien said.

Lai said that Chien was also a big part of his journey to start medication for anxiety. “Having friends like Karen who are super supportive in understanding the process of what it looks like was very helpful for me,” he said.

Their understanding and support is mutual: “I feel like I can go to him to talk about anything,” Chien said.

The ‘three wise men’: Grace Belgrader ’27, Mia Dominguez ’27 and Rose Farman-Farma ’27

Grace Belgrader ’27, Mia Dominguez ’27 and Rose Farman-Farma ’27 call themselves the “three wise men,” a name coined in the back of an Uber during their first year at Brown.

They three, who all lived on the third floor of Andrews, hit it off immediately. After meeting the other two, Farman-Farma, a staff writer for The Herald, thought, “I cannot stop talking to them.”

The trio soon found out that they have similar interests in English courses. “We like bringing in what we study in our classes to what’s happening in our lives,” Farman-Farma said.

A common thread of creativity runs through the three friends: Belgrader writes plays, Farman-Farma writes music about their lives.

“We tend to overanalyze everything,” Dominguez said. “Because we’re all humanities majors, everything becomes symbolic or thematic.”

One of the things they all agreed was special about their friendship was the fluidity of their conversations — from chatting about class content to deep talks. “We match each other’s rhythm,” Belgrader said.

This year, Farman-Farma and Belgrader were matched in Marriage Pact — the algorithmic online matching program designed to secure college students with a “marriage pact.”

“If I’m ever unsure about myself, my best friends are the smartest, most interesting, most passionate kind of people in the world,” Dominguez said. “And if they love me I must be doing something right.”

As off-campus roommates, they know each other’s quirks well: Dominguez pointed out that Belgrader will talk to herself while she works on essays, and Belgrader can always spot Dominguez’s quivering eyebrow when she’s feeling empathetic.

We’ve “been through a lot of stuff together, seen each other in our highs and lows.” Belgrader said. “Every thought is shared,” Dominguez added.

In the future, the “three wise men” hope to stay connected. “We value a lot of the same things, so our lives will inevitably intersect,” Dominguez said.

‘Mega-bed’ and mega besties: Annika Baking ’28 and Ashley Luo ’28

Annika Baking ’28 and Ashley Luo ’28 wore the same outfit — black raincoats, green tops, jeans and New Balance sneakers — to A Day on College Hill. The two met in a big group, and Luo remembers feeling shy and thinking Baking was brave for coming up to her.

Their friendship couldn’t even wait for school to begin to blossom. Luo visited Columbus, Ohio, Baking’s hometown, for a fencing tournament before their first semester. That same summer, they called to play Minecraft together.

When they finally got to campus, they were inseparable for the first three days. Both only children, they supported one another through the transition. They slept in the same bed, alternating rooms until they adjusted to college life. This year Baking and Luo are officially roommates, and have pushed their beds together into a “mega-bed.”

Despite having different sleep schedules, on the weekends, their schedules sometimes sync up. They go out together, return and get ready for bed together, wake up together and set off for brunch together.

They two had late-night chats that started long after the sun set and sometimes lasted until the morning. One night, the two stayed awake until 6 a.m. chatting outside Luo’s dorm while they waited for her dorm’s quiet hours — from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. — to end.

When the time came to go back in, they were delirious from the lack of sleep and took 20 minutes to climb up the stairs, laughing after every step. “I don’t think there was anything that was that funny,” Luo said. “We were just laughing,” Baking added.

After Brown, Baking and Luo believe they will end up living in the same city. No matter what, they plan on staying in touch and remaking their mega-bed during visits.

A ‘blossomed’ friendship: Keanu Huynh ’26 and Nicholas Clampitt ’26

Keanu Huynh ’26 found Nicholas Clampitt ’26 on a spreadsheet for people without roommates going into their sophomore year. The two aligned on lifestyle habits, so Huynh sent an email and they decided to live together.

The two were both quiet the first time they met in-person — a rendezvous in the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library lobby to choose a Hope College double.

They didn’t become instant best friends — they had different schedules and didn’t speak that much until the end of their sophomore year. But their friendship has now “blossomed,” Clampitt said.

In their junior year, they lived together again. At a birthday party that fall, the two met new friends, and that brought them together. Huynh was off-campus during the spring semester, and “talking to Nick was basically (his) only connection to campus,” he said.

As roommates of three years, the two have begun many traditions, from watching bad movies to steak nights — with ribeye, caramelized onions and wine. “It’s a whole thing,” Huynh said.

From humble beginnings as roommates of convenience, Clampitt and Huynh take notice of one another’s habits. “You always got this pace about you, like a hustle, like you got somewhere to be every time you’re walking,” Clampitt said to Huynh.

“That’s my dad’s New Yorker passing down to me,” Huynh joked.

With a Marriage Pact score of 93%, the roommates share custody of a stress ball they refer to as their child, found in a random room in Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center.

Jokes embellish their friendship, which is bright with humor. Clampitt entered their room last semester to see Huynh with an elf costume. Huynh told him not to worry about it.

The next time Clampitt saw Huynh, he was out in the elf costume, which he proceeded to wear for the next two weeks.

“I love it,” Clampitt says. “I wish I could have been Santa Claus.”

Bagels, crosswords and ‘the perfect day’: Samantha Zhang ’27 and Kiara Anderson ’27

Samantha Zhang ’27 and Kiara Anderson ’27 lived on the same floor in their first year and met through mutual friends. But Anderson’s first distinct memory of meeting Zhang was at a men’s soccer game, when Zhang thought that she’d lost her credit card.

“She was very distressed about that,” Anderson said. “I thought she hated me because she never even looked in my direction.” But as they spent more time together, “she warmed up to me,” Anderson said.

As classes began, they discovered they were both taking PHP 0310: “Health Care in the United States.” Their friendship really grew as they bonded over cruciverbalist tendencies — and when they began getting Blue Room bagels every day before class.

Their love for crosswords has followed them across the classes they’ve taken together.

Zhang is a student in the Program in Liberal Medical Education, and Anderson, by association, has become an honorary PLME. One day, they ventured to a PLME event at the medical school, realizing they hadn’t left College Hill for all of the first semester. After they couldn’t find the room, they decided to make the most of their time in the city.

The two then had what they still call “the perfect day”: They got brunch at The District, ventured to a bookstore, and wandered for the whole day. Since that fateful day, exploring new places to eat has become a big part of their friendship; Amy’s and Small Point Cafe rank among their favorites.

Not all of their adventures have been in good weather — they fondly recalled crossing a flooding Thayer Street to get hot and sour soup. In the cold, they start making up stories to withstand the weather: white sand beaches and deserts with camels and volcanic eruptions.

The two have many more stories. They’ve planned a whole life out: matching adjacent brownstones with parallel balconies, situated across from what will be their favorite cafe. They talked of a gate between their yards that could be opened to let their dogs play while they indulge in their morning coffee.

“We do everything together,” Anderson said.