Anders James Gulbrandson got Emma Diane Shattuck’s father’s blessing to marry, with one last task left to do: planting a tree on the Shattuck’s family’s 150-acre farm in Sheshequin Township, Pa.
During his wedding speech on June 20, her father happily granted his blessing, with the understanding that the task would be completed. The next day, Gulbrandson planted three willow trees on the family farm, at the site where the couple exchanged their vows.
Born in Okinawa, Japan, the oldest of six, with a nomadic military childhood, Shattuck loves the farm. Her father, awarded a Purple Heart, retired as a master chief petty officer from the U.S. Navy, and inspired her military service.
“I didn’t know for sure I’d make the wedding,” Shattuck, 26, said. She is a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps serving as a communications strategy and operations officer who has been deployed with three consecutive extensions in the Caribbean, starting in August 2025.
Her homecoming was June 1. Her next assignment is at Marine Corps Base Hawaii, Kaneohe Bay.
Gulbrandson, 25, nicknamed Derz, a lieutenant junior grade submariner in the Navy stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was on a two-week leave.
Shattuck recently calculated that they dated in person only 22 percent of the time from January 2024 until June 2026. The rest was FaceTime, text, letters and email.
“I had seen him on the bus,” said Shattuck, as she sat with the women’s rugby team and he, oblivious, with the men’s hockey team during plebe summer 2019 at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis.
They each graduated from the Naval Academy with Bachelor of Science degrees — Shattuck in English and Gulbrandson in chemistry. He also received a master’s degree in chemistry as a Churchill Scholar from the University of Cambridge.
Shattuck easily recognized Gulbrandson that fall by “his very prominent eyebrows,” she said, when they sat across from each other as midshipmen in leadership class and often chatted about coursework.
“I recognized he was brilliant,” she said, especially after he volunteered to teach the first student-taught lesson.
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After she asked for pointers, they met at the Nimitz Library, where Shattuck, who loved art, couldn’t get over his screensaver — Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.”
That week in October, she asked him out for coffee.They went to the Red Bean on Main Street.
“She was so unique, so beautiful,” he said. “But, I did not want a girlfriend. I wanted to focus on chemistry and hockey.”
Her texts afterward went unanswered for long stretches.
“It was 100 percent unrequited love,” she said.
They soon found common ground elsewhere — her beekeeping project — and eventually dated other people at school.
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.
From September 2024 to June 2025, when Gulbrandson studied at the U.S. Navy Nuclear Power School in Goose Creek, near Charleston, S.C., she visited on weekends from Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, N.C. They washed down oysters, which she picked up at a roadside stand, with chilled Aval cider.
On May 12, 2025, before her first deployment, while visiting his parents in Orono, he proposed at his parents’ cabin on Lower Whitefish Lake. “I flew in your parents,” he told her, and the next day they all celebrated together.
On June 20, after being apart for 11 months, the couple married in a self-uniting ceremony before 162 guests at the bride’s family farm, with Captain David J. Durkin, the groom’s mentor at Annapolis, taking part.
“We love the military, but it’s my time to be in white,” said Shattuck, who wore a white ball gown with a bouquet of white tulips, while the groom wore a navy suit.
The couple cut a small cake with two swords — her brother’s from West Point and Gulbrandson’s from the Naval Academy — and danced the Lindy Hop to “Linus and Lucy,” the “Peanuts” theme song, for their first dance.
“I want to revel in the normal with Anders,” Shattuck said. Soon they would be apart again for a few months.
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