How A Global Pandemic Wrote A Richmond Love Story 50 Years Later

RICHMOND, VA — Fifty years can be a long time, especially when it means reconnecting with someone from your distant past. But for Betty Conner and Peter Nickless, all it took was five decades and a global pandemic to bring to lives back together.

Conner, a 71-year-old retiree and Nickless, a carefree sailor, had attended Richmond’s Huguenot High School together in the 1960s. In their high school days, Nickless was the co-captain of the football team and where Conner’s shy personality kept her from becoming overly involved in school activities.

Like many high school classmates, Conner and Richmond lost touch after last seeing each other at a New Year’s Eve party in 1967. But in the nearly 54 years since, Conner never forgot about Nickless, whom she described to the Washington Post as a hippie who ended up moving to Baha, California, where he fond a home on a sailboat named Expectation.

“He doesn’t remember the party,” Conner told The Post. “But I do.”

After graduation, Conner and Nickless each went their separate ways. They lived their lives, married and divorced. But as long-lost friends often to, the two reconnected on Facebook, the Post reported. But when Nickless returned to Richmond to visit family in 2018 and 2019, a social media connection with Conner turned into occasional phone calls and emails. And despite the miles that separated the two people who never dated during high school, Conner says she began to fall for the former football player turned sailor.

The two soon discovered they had more in common than they ever imagined. But as the coronavirus pandemic set in last March, their connection deepened, according to the Post. Peter wished Betty a Happy Valentine’s Day last February and weeks later, she reciprocated by wishing him a Happy Birthday.

With both at high-risk of the coronavirus, Conner finally decided to express the feelings for Nickless that had been building last March. According to the Post, she sent Nickless an email with the subject line, “The Teen-age Betty In Me Confesses”.

“I wasn’t planning on really liking you – but I do,” Conner wrote in the email, according to The Post. “I am trying not to like you too much, but that is harder than I thought it would be.”

In the lines that followed, Conner expressed her concerns over Nickless’ safety as the pandemic intensified. She told him to take orders to quarantine seriously, referring to him as “laid back” and her as a “worrier.”

“Just be more careful,” she wrote, according to The Post. “I will work on liking you less, so you won’t think I am a pest, a pain, crazy, weird, etc. !!!”

Yet, while Conner was concerned she was the only seeking a connection, Nickless told The Post that he was feeling the same way about the woman he found himself falling for.

“Those talks prompted both of them to ponder: “Where am I going the rest of my life?,” Nickless told the newspaper. “Where are we going the rest of our lives? How can we make the best of it for each of us?”

Nickless soon had his answer.

He decided to act on his feelings and got off his sailboat in Mexico and returned to Richmond after telling Conner that he was coming back to Virginia, telling her that he could see them being together for the rest of their lives.

Nickless arrived back in Richmond last July, where the two friends traded their emails in phone calls with face-to-face time together — in the midst of the global pandemic that erased the miles between them.

Within a short time, the couple was Facebook official and all these months later, Nickless decided to sell his boat and trade in his carefree life on the water for one spent with his old high school classmate finding romance in their golden years – with nothing but happiness seemingly looming ahead.

“Sometimes good friendships very unexpectedly develop into much more.” Betty wrote on Facebook last year, according to the Post. “We assure you that no one is more surprised about this than we are!”

The romance 50 years in the making appears to have a very happy ending.