Although David John Evans IV and Frish Brandt were in their late 60s when they came face to face over Zoom in October 2021, their early interactions had the freshness and excitement of being children all over again.
Brandt had enrolled in a yearlong class that Evans co-founded at Stanford called “Designing Your Life.”
She was on campus early in the semester, and registered for Evans’s virtual office hours for new students. Theirs was the sixth session of the afternoon, but, for him, the most memorable. “The second the screen opens, bang!” he said, remembering the moment. “I mean, this is involuntary, somatic, mystical, right-through-the-freaking-zoom-electron cosmosphere!”
“I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to ask somebody out to dinner during office hours,” Evans said he recalled thinking, so he tried to find a pretext to keep the conversation going.
Brandt took the ensuing flurry of emails at face value. “I thought, ‘Wow, these Stanford professors are really attentive,’” she said, jokingly. But as the correspondence continued in the weeks afterward, she sensed that something else was in the mix by the time Evans asked her out for coffee later that month.
The energy of their initial courtship felt like a trip back in time. “It was like passing notes in school when we were kids,” Brandt said.
Yet there were also elements that were profoundly mature. Both Brandt and Evans have grown children from previous marriages that ended in divorce. Evans’s second wife of two decades, Claudia, had died of cancer 10 months earlier, in December 2020.
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After several weeks of email, coffees, cocktails and a kiss in a San Francisco dive bar, Evans asked Brandt whether she thought this could evolve into a relationship. Brandt, however, encouraged Evans to date other women. She thought it was important for Evans, as a recent widower, to see what the dating scene was like. And as a self-described happily single woman for 30 years, she wasn’t looking to marry.
It was also a daunting prospect to bring together two lives that had developed separately for so long. “We’ve got 145 years to work with,” Evans said.
Evans, 73, was born in Pasadena, Calif. After completing both a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in thermosciences from Stanford, he worked in technology and later consulting before cofounding Stanford’s Life Design Lab in 2007. Evans is also an author of several books, including the 2016 best seller “Designing Your Life.”
Brandt, 72, was born in Chicago and graduated from the California College of the Arts with a bachelor’s degree in studio art before joining San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery, where she later served as president. She retired in 2024, and has since embarked on a new career as a “letter midwife,” working closely with hospice and palliative care patients, helping them draft letters to loved ones. She now teaches a class on the subject at Stanford’s medical school.
In January 2022, after going on other dates, Evans told Brandt that she was the person he wanted to see consistently. They talked openly about his grief over Claudia, and Evans remembered that Brandt had said to him, “I look forward to knowing her better.”
“We are an accretion of who we’ve been all our lives, and that includes the people that have been in our lives,” Brandt said.
The two continued to see each other regularly. In January 2024, while dining at a restaurant in Santa Cruz, Calif., where Evans lives, he spontaneously proposed, even though he didn’t have a ring. “I didn’t say ‘no,’” Brandt said. “I said ‘in time.’” The couple returned to the restaurant in March to redo what Evans called the “January screw up.”
And so began a two-year engagement; they bought wedding rings the following September and set the date for Aug. 2, 2026.
“If you’re going to be really married, you have to do all the work every time, and every marriage is a completely new construction,” Evans said, paraphrasing a friend’s advice. “This thing is bigger than you, and it’s going to ask a lot of you. We’re supposed to step not just into, but step up.”
“When you do this at 70 instead of at 23, it’s different,” Brandt said. The couple dispensed with some wedding conventions — such as flower girls and a wedding cake — but kept others. Brandt wore white, and for her bouquet, cut Blue Moon roses from Claudia’s flower garden in Santa Cruz.
Eleanor Harrison Bregman, a friend and former minister who is ordained through American Marriage Ministries and specializes in interfaith couples, officiated a ceremony that drew upon both the bride and groom’s respective Jewish and Christian traditions.
The ceremony was held near Stanford’s campus with around 50 guests, including five children from earlier marriages, and nine grandchildren.
“Who thinks at this point in their life, given loves and losses and griefs and all that stuff, that they’re going to get something like this?” Brandt said. “We’re really having the time of our lives.”
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