Juniors Olyvia Oeverman and Jacob Beckwith didn’t want to wait until senior year to be engaged. Courtesy | Olyvia Oeverman
Instagram posts, word-of-mouth, and diamonds on left hands: The news travels quickly when Hillsdale students get engaged. The “ring by spring” phenomenon doesn’t apply only to seniors, though. At least a dozen junior couples are engaged, with some planning to wed before graduation.
While some might assume “ring by spring” emerges from a strong cultural pressure to tie the knot — or at least pop the question — engaged junior couples say otherwise. They trace the timing of their relationships to months or years of discernment, rather than peer pressure.
Juniors Aidan Christian and Catherine Graham, who got engaged over spring break in Graham’s hometown, disagreed about whether Hillsdale students are influenced by “ring by spring.”
“There is no ring by spring culture,” Christian said.
“There totally is,” Graham said.
Christian felt the phrase is more slang than actual practice — students are not basing their decisions around the phenomenon.
“I wasn’t influenced by it,” Christian said. “I’m just making decisions based on what’s going to be best for our relationship and for our future family.”
Though Graham said she didn’t feel pressured and made the decision to get engaged after evaluating what made sense for her and Christian, her single friends are worried they won’t be getting married shortly after college.
“Women my age feel very pressured to at least be in a very serious relationship before they graduate,” Graham said. “As a woman, nobody wants to say it, but your life plan is so much more contingent on marriage than it is if you’re a guy.”
According to Christian, too small a portion of campus gets engaged before the end of senior year to call “ring by spring” a culture, but rather it is just a symptom of the Hillsdale experience.
“It’s definitely a phenomenon that happens here and not many other places,” Christian said.
Christian traces this annual trend to the way Hillsdale students tend to grow up fast.
“It’s weird for a senior to be so different from a freshman that it’s almost hard to have a conversation,” Christian said. “That happens here a lot. We grow up fast and we’re forced to, and that’s the nature of our education.”
Graham agreed, saying Hillsdale tends to attract people with independent personalities, who take life seriously and plan to become functional adults.
Christian said he initially didn’t want to go to college, believing it would be another four years of childish adventures on someone else’s dime. What he found instead — especially since buying Graham’s engagement ring — was an adventure of a different kind.
“Since I’ve had the ring in my room, I just had a really hard time doing anything childish,” Christian said. “Learning how to love Catherine has been my adventure at Hillsdale College.”
Juniors Jacob Beckwith and Olyvia Oeverman, engaged Feb. 22, began their own adventure of love through the Hillsdale College Roundnet Club.
The two met in the fall of their freshman year through roundnet, also known as Spikeball.
“I would just go outside to the quad and play Spikeball all the time,” Oeverman said. “So I think the first time we met was one of those days in the sunshine on the quad.”
While Beckwith may have stood out to Oeverman in the Spikeball club, his name did not.
“There was a Jacob, another Jacob, and two or three Jakes,” Oeverman said. “I was like, ‘There are too many of you!’”
The two went on to play on the same intramural volleyball team, and their friendship grew.
“I was probably interested first,” Oeverman said. “It was pretty mutual though.”
As the couple got to know one another better, Oeverman began going to Beckwith’s club soccer games with her sister.
“We’d refer to him as the orange cleats guy,” Oeverman said. “He bought a new pair of cleats. They are still orange.”
Oeverman and the orange cleats guy started dating later that semester. Fast forward two years, and Beckwith was planning his proposal — and misleading Oeverman was part of the plan.
“We were planning on getting engaged at some point, but he had totally made me think that it was going to be right before the summer, maybe the beginning of the summer,” Oeverman said. “The soonest I thought was Easter weekend.”
According to Oeverman, the couple talked about engagement rings the week before he proposed.
“He made it sound like he hadn’t even started the process of trying to figure out which ring,” Oeverman said.
So when Beckwith proposed the following weekend, Oeverman was caught off guard.
“I could not have been more surprised,” Oeverman said.
According to Oeverman, the culture at Hillsdale hasn’t accelerated the pace of their relationship.
“I think Jacob and I, to be honest, were pretty serious right from when we started dating,” Oeverman said. “He was very much always a think-to-the-future guy.”
Oeverman said the Hillsdale community has welcomed the news of their engagement.
“People have been, at least at Hillsdale and at least to our faces, so excited,” Oeverman said. “People just share a joy.”
Beckwith and Oeverman plan to get married around the New Year. They follow in the steps of two of Oeverman’s older sisters, who have married men they met at Hillsdale.
“My parents, who have five daughters, have already had two other daughters married in the past year and so they’ve been through it, and they love it, but it’s crazy,” Oeverman said.
According to Oeverman, marriage has been on her and Beckwith’s minds earlier than for other couples in part because they have been surrounded by Oeverman’s sisters, one of whom met, got engaged to, and married her now-husband in the time Oeverman and Beckwith have been dating.
“They progressed in their relationship way faster, which in a way is hard,” Oeverman said. “We had to just know ourselves and know what God was calling us to.”
Before Beckwith popped the question, junior Ezra Phillips had proposed to sophomore Madison Risner over Christmas break when the couple was in their hometown in Nashville.
“I took her to a state park that we’ve been to a lot,” Phillips said. “We walked the entire loop, and somehow she didn’t realize I had the ring box with me. It was so obvious to me.”
Risner said she was surprised when he got down on one knee by a lake at the end of the loop.
“I knew the proposal was going to happen,” Risner said. “But I didn’t know he’d asked for my parents’ blessing yet.”
The couple met through their youth group years before they came to Hillsdale.
“We saw each other multiple times a week,” Risner said. “I started liking him way before he did. Eventually, I wrote him this note saying, ‘Do you like me?’”
Phillips laughed.
“I did not know that note was a, ‘By the way I like you,’” Phillips said. “I thought that note was a, ‘You’re acting weird, stop it.’ I know better now.”
The pair started dating several months later, while Phillips was a senior in high school and Risner a junior. They cite the influence of their youth pastor in instilling a sense of intentionality in their approach to relationships.
“When we began dating, it was less of a, ‘This is for fun, we will see where it goes,’” Phillips said. “It was that, but also neither of us were going to start dating if we couldn’t see ourselves eventually getting married.”
Phillips and Risner said they weighed the support of their friends and family as well as financial concerns in determining their wedding date.
“When I talked to my parents, they were very supportive of it,” Phillips said. “The main thing is just being cautious. We want to know that we’re both going to graduate, that we’re not dropping out for financial stuff. We’ve both experienced a lot of provision from the Lord in terms of providing for us next year, which in my mind is just confirmation.”
After they get married this summer, Phillips and Risner said they plan to move into their new Hillsdale housing early and work on finding steady local jobs.
Another junior getting married this summer is Claire Lashaway. Lashaway said she always thought she would meet her future spouse outside of college, but had no expectations of getting married before graduation.
“I think I just came in with the idea that I would do school,” Lashaway said. “If I found someone here, bonus, but I wasn’t expecting it. In fact, I had the idea I wouldn’t find anyone here. I always figured I’d marry someone I knew from home, and the Lord did bless me.”
Lashaway plans to get married this summer to Caleb Bowers, a childhood friend who is training as an electrician. The couple got engaged over spring break.
“I don’t ever remember not knowing him,” Lashaway said. “We grew up together, went to church together, my siblings and I played together with him.”
After Bowers’s family stopped going to their church, Lashaway said she didn’t see him for years.
“Then at the beginning of last semester, he started coming back to our church again,” Lashaway said. “From there, it’s history.”
Lashaway said it didn’t take long for the two to see they wanted to be together. The couple, both of whom are from the Hillsdale area, plan to get married at Hillsdale’s United Brethren church.
“The youth pastor there is marrying us because he’s just been so instrumental in both of our lives,” Lashaway said.
Lashaway said her parents are supportive of the wedding.
“They knew it was wiser for me to marry now and finish school together than to continue trying to split myself in two ways, school and still seeing him,” Lashaway said. “My dad told me, ‘I highly agree with you, as long as you finish school strong, because you finish what you started when you’re a person of your word.’”
Like Lashaway, junior Noah Northon is planning to marry someone from home. He proposed to Emma Den Braber on Valentine’s Day: the anniversary of the day he first told her he liked her, as a sophomore in high school.
“We were pretty young, and she was playing hard to get,” Northon said. “We didn’t start dating until November of my junior year.”
Northon said it was over winter break that he decided he wanted to propose soon, after a period of prayer and discernment.
“I know we’re compatible emotionally, and we’ve seen each other in a lot of phases of life,” Northon said. “We’ve moved through that well, we communicate well. But I was like, ‘How am I going to provide for her?’”
Northon described sometimes feeling stuck at school, not able to see what his future would hold.
“Finishing the first semester of junior year, having a decent semester, gave me that little bit of encouragement, of consolation,” Northon said. “I was talking to Emma a lot about it, and having those conversations again lit a fire in my heart.”
According to Northon, he snuck home one Saturday after winter break to get his future father-in-law’s blessing. He attempted to disguise the trip from Den Braber by telling her he had a shooting class.
“That was a great conversation, we just talked for hours,” Northon said. “But Emma saw my location. I thought I had turned it off, but I didn’t turn it off.”
When Den Braber asked about his location, Northon said he couldn’t cover it up. Yet the exact timing of his proposal remained a surprise. He visited her on Valentine’s Day, for what Northon said he hoped she would assume was a normal Valentine’s date.
“I also mentioned going to the lakeshore, since I’ve never seen the lake frozen, and it’s been a really long time since she’s seen the lake frozen,” Northon said. “That’s where I ended up proposing.”
The couple plan to get married in the summer of 2026, after Northon graduates. According to Northon, he has benefited from conversations with his friends in discerning the timing of his relationship, but never felt pressure from the Hillsdale community one way or another.
“We just do our own schedule, our own thing,” Northon said. “Frankly, we weren’t influenced at all by Hillsdale’s ring by spring culture.”
According to Northon, Hillsdale students are right to be flexible, not seeing an early marriage and a career path as directly in competition with one another. Yet Northon also said students can prize marriage so much they inadvertently hinder themselves from building serious relationships.
“I think people can maybe get, not necessarily too eager, but automatically assume that, ‘Oh, we’re getting married,’ or ‘We’re not getting married,’ on the first date,” Northon said. “You still have to be open to a sort of playfulness in the discernment process.”
