Love at First Shake
Dan Martucci ’17 and Emma Johnson ’17 created their secret handshake the day they met.
To be fair, the handshake exercise was part of their fall 2013 first-year seminar (FSEM), and the game, as best the couple can remember, involved memorizing a series of complex hand gestures with a partner as a way to break the ice.
Awkward, maybe, but it worked — and Martucci was instantly struck by the dark- haired Chicago native he was paired with.
“I remember thinking, ‘That’s the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen,’” he says.
Johnson, too, “developed a crush immediately,” a feeling that grew over the following weeks, when she got to know Martucci, who grew up in Princeton, N.J., in their FSEM classes.
“He was kind and funny,” she says. “He’s a very driven person and a leader, and I was drawn to that.”
As the duo acclimated to Colgate, they bonded over being city kids in a rural, small town. They still laugh, Martucci says, about the time they planned a romantic Valentine’s Day dinner at the Hamilton Inn on the outskirts of town. When Google told them the restaurant was about 2 miles from campus, they decided to walk — not exactly appreciating the route’s lack of pedestrian-friendly streets.
“We were all dressed up, basically hiking for an hour through the snow on these dark, back roads,” says Martucci. “The blisters were intense.”
They also connected over their shared drive to succeed academically. Johnson was on the pre-med track, majoring in biochemistry with a minor in classics, and Martucci double majored in history and geography. The library, they say, became their second home.
“That’s really where we got to know each other,” Martucci says. “Spending those late nights studying together.”
After graduation, Johnson went on to a research position at the National Institutes of Health and, soon after, medical school at Drexel University in Philadelphia; Martucci was hired by a trading firm in Manhattan. They made the distance work through weekend visits and “learned a ton about communication,” says Johnson. “Our relationship required more effort than it did when we were at Colgate, but we grew closer as a result.”
Though they had talked about marriage casually, Johnson wasn’t expecting more than a “chill weekend” in May 2022, when she flew to New York to celebrate Martucci’s birthday. But Martucci’s idea for the visit was anything but low key. In addition to arranging a surprise dinner at a restaurant with their group of friends, Martucci had rented out Central Park’s Conservatory Garden — and hired a photographer — with plans to propose among the spring blooms.
A delayed flight threatened to foil his plot, but the proposal was a success — and Johnson was thrilled to celebrate their engagement with friends before returning to the grind of medical school.
After taking some time to “enjoy being engaged,” says Johnson, they began to plan the perfect winter wedding they’d envisioned. “We had been to so many summer weddings, and we knew we wanted something different,” says Martucci, who let Johnson take the lead on planning as long as “sweating outside in a tuxedo” was not on the itinerary.
Both of their families had connections to Newport, R.I., and they loved the idea of celebrating in one of the coastal town’s famously opulent Gilded Age mansions. After a year and a half of planning, Johnson and Martucci tied the knot on New Year’s Eve at the historic Rosecliff Mansion, where guests, including many Colgate friends, joined the couple to ring in 2024.
Today, the newlyweds are settled in New York; Johnson matched into orthopedic residency at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx in 2023, and Martucci works as a research analyst for Manhattan-based hedge fund Millennium. While their opposite schedules can be tricky (Johnson often works nights and 24-hour shifts at the hospital), they’re happy to finally be in the same place again — and to be navigating married life, hand in hand.