In November 2012, Schuyler Ebersol spotted an Instagram photo of his future wife, Clementina Davila, standing next to his cousin. He was immediately smitten. “For years at family gatherings the same question came up: why hadn’t I been introduced to her,” Ebersol says, adding that he thought she looked like “an angel.” Nearly five years later, that same cousin noticed the two were both living in Charlottesville, so she finally set them up on a dinner date.
“Clementina called her on the way to the restaurant to ask how to pronounce my name,” Schuyler recalls, with a laugh. The two hit it off, and the date went on for hours. “We discovered we had both originally gone to college to be architects, both harbored a dream of moving to New Zealand despite never having been there, and both were obsessed with space,” Schuyler says. After the date, he called his sister and said he’d marry Clementina the next day if he was crazy enough to ask.
It took a bit longer than that. Life pulled them apart for several years, but they eventually reunited when she took a job near where his parents lived in Connecticut and suggested they meet up next time he was in town. (Clementina is a marketing and brand strategist and former NCAA All-American tennis player, and Schuyler works in the artificial intelligence and space industries.) Naturally, he immediately planned a visit home and invited her over to his parents’ house. “That evening, my father pulled me aside in the kitchen and asked, ‘What the hell are you waiting for?’” Just this year, Schuyler found out that Clementina had overheard the sweet exchange.
The couple got engaged in 2023 at an overlook called Raven’s Roost—a location in Charlottesville they had shared a sunrise hike at six years earlier. Overjoyed, she said yes, but expressed disappointment that she’d be heading back to Connecticut the following day. Only she wasn’t. “I said, ‘You’re not, we’re going to Mexico to see your family,’” Schuyler says. He had planned a surprise trip to celebrate the engagement. “She asked if my family would be there, and I said ‘no’—but unbeknownst to her, they had already flown down.” The following day they arrived at the Mexico City airport to find both of their families waiting for them.
