Emerson Evans and Lindsey Spann were just friendly classmates before a bout of appendicitis and a plate of catfish turned their relationship into something more meaningful.

The two first crossed paths on campus at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway in the spring of 2002. They lived in the same co-ed dorm and were assigned to the same early morning Composition II class, which was held inside the residence hall.

They each had friends in the class, which made for plenty of lively debate and meaningful conversation. The group dynamic often carried over to the cafeteria and elsewhere in the dorm.

Lindsey and Emerson didn't have much one-on-one interaction, but she remembers having a strong intuition about him.

"When we first had that class, it wasn't like I had a crush on him, but it was more like an intuition that I had, that I felt like someday I might marry him," Lindsey says.

"Well, to be honest, I didn't have that," Emerson says.

They carried on as casual friends, and at semester's end, Lindsey went home to Little Rock for the summer and Emerson returned to his hometown, Gentry.

Emerson was sitting in music appreciation class the first day of the fall semester when, to his surprise, in walked Lindsey.

"She was the only person I knew in the class, and I was the only person she knew in the class, so we sat next to each other," he says, "and she was the only reason I passed the class."

Throughout that semester, they worked together on a few class projects and he even visited her dorm room, mostly because he thought she had cute friends.

"He wasn't interested in me that way and I don't know that I was necessarily interested in him that way then either. I really think that we were just friends," she says. "We just had fun together."

The next semester, they ended up in the same geography class, and while the subject matter changed, their relationship remained static.

They went with friends to see the Dixie Chicks in Little Rock that summer, their first truly planned event together, but even that didn't signify a change in relationship status.

In the fall of 2003, Emerson and Lindsey each moved out of the dorm and into apartments with friends. They had no classes together and no reason to bump into each other.

But when Lindsey heard that Emerson had appendicitis, she was quick to rush to his aid.

"She's the only person, other than my roommates and my mom, who checked up on me every day," Emerson says. "After that, I thought, 'You know what, she's really awesome. She's really cool and she's very nice and clearly cares about people in general. I'm her friend and she cares enough about me to check up on me.'"

He had recovered by the time Lindsey invited him to have lunch with her family. She simply enjoyed his company, she says, but it was on that day, after a meal of catfish, that he came to terms with how he felt about her. He kept that to himself until he just couldn't anymore.

On Halloween night, Lindsey and her friends were going to some haunted houses, so he waited until they were back at her apartment and went over to hang out.

"I thought they would never leave," he says of the friends.

When they finally did, Emerson poured out his heart, ending with a question of whether Lindsey would be his girlfriend.

"I was totally blindsided," Lindsey says. "When he told me, I just went off on this whole tangent about how I couldn't believe he had said that because I was totally oblivious. Finally I was like, 'Yeah, you know, I guess I am interested.'"

The transition from friends to more-than-friends was a bit of a struggle, but they withstood that challenge, and in October 2005, Emerson had another question.

At the end of a long, hot hike to the top of Pinnacle Mountain, he wanted to know if she would marry him.

"It was really hot that day. We had no water, we had no food, we had nothing except for the ring in my pocket," says Emerson, who got caught up in his decision to propose and forgot the provisions.

They were married a week after college graduation, on May 13, 2006, in the Pinnacle Room of the Peabody Little Rock hotel.

Lindsey is a kindergarten teacher at Williams Traditional Magnet School in Little Rock and Emerson is chief operating officer at Connect Arkansas. They live in Conway with their two children, 3-year-old daughter Spencer and newborn son Hudson.

"We fell in love in Conway," Emerson says, "and we fell in love with Conway."

The first time I saw my future spouse:

She says: “I knew I was going to marry him someday.”

He says: “We were classmates. I remember making fun of her and her friends about going to watch Black Hawk Down.”

I knew he/she was the one for me:

She says: “Maybe the very first time I first saw him in our Composition II class. I’m not sure how, but I just knew.”

He says: “On the weekend I went to her parents’ house to eat catfish. She was driving on the way home and I realized I liked her. At that stage it reached this peak that I realized I cared for this person and I wanted to make something out of this. I realized then that this was something special.”

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High Profile on 05/11/2014