For most first-year medical students, Year One is a marathon of note-taking, cramming for exams, and staving off the effects of sleep deprivation. But for a handful of students, mastering Cellular Function and Regulation and Molecular Basis of Life isn’t enough—they also tackle the Psychology of Love.

No, it’s not on the course curriculum and there’s no professor. But if you ace it, as Evelyn Sklar, M.D. ’80, and Virgil Sklar, M.D. ’80, did, you gain a partner for life along with your medical degree.

The Cuba-born Sklars celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary last summer, another milestone in an enduring romance that began during their initial semester of medical school at the University of Miami. They’d attended the same Miami high school—Immaculata-LaSalle—and had crossed paths innumerable times prior to medical school. They just weren’t aware of it.

“We have a picture where I’m getting inducted into National Honor Society at Immaculata-LaSalle and he’s already in National Honor Society,” laughs the former Evelyn Lopez-Centellas, who graduated high school in 1970, a year after her spouse. “We’re in the same picture, but we didn’t know each other.”

But they definitely knew academic excellence. Virgil was 16 when he graduated from high school; Evelyn was class valedictorian.

Virgil graduated from Princeton University with a degree in biochemistry at 19, followed by a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Washington University. Evelyn earned master’s degrees in physiology and biophysics in just three years from the University of Miami, where she also did her undergraduate work.

Blithely humming along in parallel universes, yet on the same wavelength, the two applied for admission into UM’s 1980 medical school class. Before classes started, Evelyn learned another Immaculata-LaSalle High graduate had been admitted. Some guy named Sklar.

Always one to do her homework, Evelyn located her high school yearbook. There were two male Sklars in the 1969 class, and Evelyn found one irresistible.

“I have a fraternal twin brother,” Virgil relates with a grin. “She had looked at two pictures and said, ‘Boy, I hope it’s this one, he’s the cute one!’ I found out about this later.”

Turned out that Evelyn liked the one that showed up just fine. “We were always in classes together and we’d always be sitting together,” she recalls.

Virgil proposed after their freshman year—during a Sklar family trip to Paris that Evelyn had been invited to join— and the two got married after their second year. The Coral Gables residents now have sons 27, 23, and 19. Evelyn is the director of the radiology residency training program at Jackson Memorial Hospital, as well as a Miller School professor, while Virgil is an ophthalmologist with a private practice in Miami.

Not only has their union withstood child rearing and career pressures, but the Sklars still interact like a couple on their first date. However, they clearly were not on the same page when Virgil stood in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, asking for Evelyn’s hand in marriage.

“I proposed to her in French,” Virgil recalls, laughing at the memory. “And you know what she said? That she didn’t understand me!”

All’s well that ends well—the Sklars returned to the Eiffel Tower for their 30th anniversary.