“You know who’s the cutest boy in our class? Zane Mabry.”
Hadiah Ritchey ’20 turned to her friends and told them this in AJ’s Cafe her senior year.
Though they barely knew each other at that point, Ritchey and Mabry ’20 are now engaged after reconnecting and dating as alumni.
Ritchey is currently the project manager for Career Services, and Mabry is the director of student activities.
The two met through intramural soccer as freshmen, but didn’t establish a friendship until the summer of 2020. That summer, Isaac Johnson ’20 and Mabry lived together with Reagan Dugan ’20 in the Wedge in downtown Hillsdale.
When Mabry, Dugan, and Johnson took a trip together up north last summer, Mabry said he was looking for the right woman, and that he hadn’t found her yet.
“We were both encouraging him that someday soon, it would be the case,” Johnson said. “That was just a few weeks before Hadiah walked back onto campus. I look back on that moment as revelatory in its own right.”
When Ritchey came back to campus for the spring semester of 2021, she served as the New Dorm house director and quickly discovered she didn’t have a mailbox. She had to text Mabry, the student union director at the time, in order to get a mailbox and key.
“It wouldn’t unlock. I tried it three times and then I talked to Zane about it,” Ritchey said. “It turned out I was just turning the key the wrong way.”
Shortly after, they began a friendship and spent time together with mutual friends. Their friend group of young alumni loved watching movies and roller skating together. Mabry asked Ritchey on their first date during a taco night that Ritchey hosted.
“When they started dating I noticed that in Zane’s book case all of the books from Dr. Schlueter’s ‘Sex, Love, and Dating, the Theology of Love’ course, all of those books started filling up the bookshelf,” Johnson said. “I knew that he was a goner and that marriage was going to happen next when one of those massive domestic etiquette books ended up on the bookshelf.”
After dating for seven months, the couple got engaged on a night Ritchey said she was least expecting: a senior class event she was managing.
“I really wanted to be engaged and I was bummed that we weren’t engaged,” Ritchey said. “I was always kind of on edge waiting to see if we would get engaged, but that was the one time I was not looking for it at all.”
On Sept. 4, senior and class president Jacob Hooper called Ritchey to pull her away from the event, asking her to fix a food order from Market House. Ritchey and Mabry began driving to fix the order, but Ritchey soon noticed Mabry making wrong turns.
The pair ended up at Mrs. Stock’s Park, where Mabry proposed. He then took her to a surprise engagement party, which included her family members flown in from Kentucky.
“They were just both glowing,” Johnson said.
Mabry and Ritchey are planning to get married in Hillsdale next summer. Looking ahead to married life, Ritchey said she is most excited to spend time with Mabry and share intellectual discussions with him.
“It’s really exciting to get to learn, anytime one of us reads a book, to hear another person’s perspective and continue the great conversation for the rest of our lives,” Ritchey said. “I’m also just excited to hang out.”
Mabry agreed with Ritchey, and said he was excited to continue to learn and also share his life with her.
“I think I’m excited to be able to share every day with Hadiah,” Mabry said.
Johnson said the pair are one of many alumni couples to get married in Hillsdale post-graduation.
“I would say it’s the romance of the year,” Johnson said.