On Military Leave Long Enough to Get Married

After graduation in 2023, Gulbrandson began hanging out at the off-campus house she shared with her friends, Lily Brown and her friend’s boyfriend, Cannon Breen, Gulbrandson’s best friend, but she avoided Gulbrandson.

That summer, after Shattuck and Gulbrandson were both single, they began a close friendship.

“I saw how much he cared for me and my friends,” she said, and joined them for dinners, the board game Carcassonne and cribbage, a popular submariner game.

One evening after she made bulgogi, a popular Korean dish, for Anders and her two housemates, he asked if he could kiss her. The pair were alone on the couch watching “Pirates of the Caribbean” and drinking Malibu rum.

“At the end of the day, I want to be with you,” he said in September 2023, just before she left for basic training in Quantico, Va., and he departed for Cambridge to begin his studies.

“I called her every night,” he said. “It never got old 3,600 miles away.”

Shattuck joined Gulbrandson at his parents’ house in Orono, Minn., where he grew up, for Thanksgiving, and during Christmas he joined her at her family’s farm and went pheasant hunting with her father.

“I started to see myself with her family,” he said.

In May 2024, during a two-week leave, she surprised him at Cambridge. They traveled locally to Barcelona and witnessed her father jump out of a World War II plane at the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings.