http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/11/AR2010021105411.html?hpid=features1&hpv=local By Ellen McCarthy Sunday, February 14, 2010 In the electric first days of her freshman year at college, Jesse Keith began to worry that she might not like a lot of the other kids at George Washington University. So many of them seemed unfriendly, and overly interested in designer jeans. This Story OnLove: The details Transcript: Tuesday, February 16 at 11 a.m. ET: OnLove OnLove: A Cupid Who Shoots From the Hip So when she met a nice guy who played on the baseball team, she latched on and invited him and his roommates to come meet hers. After introductions were made, the usual question bounced around the room: "Where are you from?" Keith's family had moved every few years while she was growing up, following her father's career as an AT&T executive. It seemed like everyone at GWU was from New Jersey, where she'd finished high school in 2002, and she didn't like being typical, so she reached further into her past. "Alpharetta, Georgia," she answered. "That's not true," responded Josh Wilkie, the baseball player's friend and teammate. "Because I'm from Alpharetta." Keith wasn't lying, exactly -- she'd lived in the Atlanta suburb from third to sixth grades. To prove it, she rattled off the names of former classmates, including her old best friend, which snapped Wilkie's attention. That was the girl he'd dated throughout much of high school. "I was like, 'You're Josh?' " recalls Keith, who'd kept up on her friend's love life after she moved away. They quickly became pals, and Keith began dating the baseball player she'd first met while Wilkie started seeing one of her friends. Neither relationship stuck, but the friendship between Wilkie and Keith did, and it lasted throughout college. "We were best friends," says Keith, who eventually discovered that they'd stood one person apart in their sixth-grade band photo. Keith was forever trying to set up Wilkie, a pitcher for the Colonials, with single friends. And when she was on the market, Wilkie would do the same for her. "You gotta meet this girl; she's awesome," he remembers telling available buddies. But even if a guy got in the door with Keith, he didn't stay long. Within a month of every relationship she started, she came up with a reason to call it off. "I would find something crazy wrong with them. I'd be like 'Your ear -- the way it is -- I can't date you anymore,' " she says. "It was terrible. My friends were really nervous I was never gonna get married." This Story OnLove: The details Transcript: Tuesday, February 16 at 11 a.m. ET: OnLove OnLove: A Cupid Who Shoots From the Hip Wilkie was witness to all of it: "He knew everything about me -- everyone I dated, everything behind the scenes, everything in front of the scenes." To celebrate their 2006 graduation, Wilkie, Keith, six other friends and all their families went out to dinner. That night, Wilkie's grandmother made a proclamation: "She said, 'You need to go after Jesse,' " he recalls. "I was like, 'What? She's like my friend.' You know, I'd never thought about it." The next night, while they were all out at a bar, a guy Keith was dating dropped a similar, if less cordial, bug in her ear: "He was like, 'Um, I think you like your best friend,' " she remembers. Days later Wilkie was back in Georgia, waiting to see whether he'd be drafted to play professional baseball. He was not. Disappointed, he decided to recharge at home before going to Colorado to join the ski patrol. The next week, he made one last trip to Washington to pack up his stuff. Keith and one of her girlfriends had befriended Jose Guillén, then an outfielder for the Nationals. They mentioned Wilkie's setback to him and, while out with the girls one night, Guillén asked about the pitcher's stats and called Wilkie to chat. A couple of mornings later he called again, telling Wilkie to hustle down to RFK Stadium. There, waiting for him, was a fresh uniform and the head pitching coach, who was willing to give him a tryout. Later that day, he was told to pack his bags and head south: He was wanted for a Gulf Coast farm team. But something equally momentous had developed that week: Walking home with Keith one night, Wilkie found himself saying, "You know what, Jess, you'd be the perfect girl for me." She responded: "I know -- you'd be perfect for me." And on a summer evening in D.C., the two friends had their first kiss. Then he left. "I've never been as sad as I was then," Keith says. "I was like, 'It's just bad timing! He's gone.' " She visited him in Florida three times the following month, and though they were still in the habit of introducing each other as "my best friend," it was now much more than that. "It wasn't even like we went through a 'like' stage. It was like immediately we were in love with each other," she says. Both felt strange about the transition at first, and Keith was terrified she'd find some nit to pick about Wilkie and pull out of the relationship, losing her closest friend in the process. "There would be times when if I got worked up, I'd just shut him out, and he'd be like, 'No, you need to talk to me about it,' " she says. "He definitely taught me how to love." Their relationship has been a part-time long-distance one since it began, as Wilkie worked his way up the Nationals franchise. The 25-year-old pitcher played for the Nats' AAA minor league team in Syracuse, N.Y., and is hoping to be called up to the majors this season. "Distance will either make you stronger or not, and in our case it makes us stronger," Keith says. "But it's definitely hard," On her 25th birthday, in January 2009, Wilkie proposed during a vacation in the Caribbean with Keith's family. The tropical theme did not carry over to their wedding, however -- the skies had just finished dumping two feet of snow on Washington when the two exchanged vows at the National Museum of Women in the Arts on Feb. 6. The pair were expecting 160 guests; 140 made it, braving flight changes, Metro delays and impassable roads. Family friend and Red Cross chief executive Gail McGovern walked to the event after her car was stranded in the snow. But the bride and groom would still call themselves fortunate: for the heroic efforts made to pull off their wedding, but mostly for each other. Not everyone's greatest friendship can turn into love, Keith knows, "but if there's something more there, you're the luckiest person in the world." --

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