The 24-year-old bride had been holding onto this piece of paper for a decade.
Skip to ContentWhen it came to love, Claire Sullivan played the long game.the groom — with a keepsake from their high school love story she’d been holding onto all these years, just in case.on TikTok, with people in the comments calling her the “mastermind Taylor Swift was talking about.
” Sullivan, a 24-year-old art teacher, remembered being struck by her now-husband, Nolan Dunkle, also 24, when he walked into their freshman year English class in 2016. As she explained in her speech, she asked her English teacher if the seats were permanent. The teacher said “the name tags were just for show. ” So, Sullivan decided she was going to pick up Dunkle’s name tag and “bamboozle him” into sitting with her the next day at class.
“My plans working,” she said in her speech. They were “buddies for the rest of the year,” then started dating the following year and throughout high school. After graduation, which coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, they broke up, with Dunkle going to college in California and Sullivan“I was like, ‘You know, if one day we ever got back together, I probably wish I kept this. ’ So I just let it sit,” Sullivan tells TODAY.com.
“I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it. ”During their two years apart, she dated other people and realized what they had was a “very, very rare thing. ” “I didn’t understand a connection like that was so special until you break up and you experience other people and other things, and you’re like, ‘Oh wait, it’s not like this with everyone else,’” she says. Dunkle and Sullivan got engaged two years after getting back together.
Preparing a speech at her wedding, she remembered the name tag from the first day of their love story, still sitting in the English binder at her parents’ house.
“How funny would it be to have a ‘gotcha’ moment? ” she remembered thinking. Sullivan says Dunkle was “intrigued but not shocked” by her speech and the maneuver, which he learned of“I told him a few years ago that I had the name card — he knew I kept it, but not really why,” she says.
His side of the family also thought the name card might be a prop, not the“My family was like, ‘I do not doubt that Claire kept this and planned this. ’ They thought it was on brand,” she says. As for being called a mastermind?
“I’ll accept it, but I don’t know if I deserve that much credit,” Sullivan says. “For me, this is all rational and normal. This is just how my brain works. Trying to find a piece for everything to fit into my life.
” Sullivan says this is just an example of the strong sense of intuition that’s guided her through her lifetime, a trait she shares with her 102-year-old grandmother.
“She’s had these intuitions her whole life — kind of been able to see a story coming towards her, and then it ends up happening. I don’t know if that influenced me to believe that I can do that too, but I believe in intuition and cosmic luck,” she says. Elena Nicolaou is a senior entertainment editor at TODAY.com, where she covers the latest in TV, pop culture, movies and all things streaming.
Her superpower is matching people up with the perfect book. Previously, she covered culture at Refinery29 and Oprah Daily. She got her bachelor's degree in English with a concentration in Modern Greek Studies from Columbia University.
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