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Buckle up, my friends. This one’s a doosey.
“This is an announcement that will come as a surprise to many,” 25-year-old Cameron Platt began her private Facebook post announcing that she is engaged to her 71-year-old Princeton professor and mentor whose English course she took five years back.
Check out my man Lee Clark Mitchell on Princeton’s Faculty site HERE. Decently studly older dude.
Platt, Princeton’s 2016 valedictorian who recently finished her master’s degree at the University of Oxford, gushed on social media about the genesis of the uncommon love with Lee Clark Mitchell, chair of Princeton’s English Department and 46 years Platt’s senior. The two met when Platt was enrolled in one of his classes during the fall of 2013.
“I was taking his lecture course on Henry James and William Faulkner. Lee was little more than a stranger to me then, but he captivated me with his brilliance, sensitivity, and passion,” Platt wrote in a April 18 Facebook post. “His lectures changed forever the way that I think.”
Platt revealed that after that course, Lee became a “devoted mentor” to her and after she left for Oxford, she was “surprised to find how much I still thought of Lee.”
“At the end of my two years in Oxford, after much reflection, and with encouragement from my wonderful friends, I resolved to shoot my shot.”
The Rhodes scholar reached out to Mitchell this past September and asked him out for a date at the MET museum in New York City.
“Lee spent most of our date trying to figure out whether it was, in fact, a date; we rambled through the Met like shy teens, eager but tentative, unsure of how to test new boundaries with each other. At last, to our amazement, we broke through.”
The couple didn’t proceed without immense caution, discussing the challenges that await for two people on opposite sides of time.
“Each of us had concerns about coming together from such different stages of life, to which we gave serious thought over many conversations. But eventually it became impossible to deny how fully we feel meant for each other, and neither of us has looked back since.”
After nearly seven months of dates, the two are now engaged to get married.
Congratulations to the happy couple.