USD Magazine Summer 2010

ike most people, the idea of “love at first sight” existed for Curtis Dadian LOVE, ACTUALLY When Curtis met Ayda, sparks didn’t   just fly, they burst into an open flame   By Nathan Dinsdale [ i r r e s i s t i b l e ] L

pect of marriage. Soon after, the couple was engaged. “It sounds crazy — and maybe it was crazy — but it didn’t seem crazy at the time,” Dadian says. “I thought that was it. She’d go home, come back, we’d get married and ride off into the sunset, right?” Not quite. Ayda returned to Syria, only to call a week later to report that her family had no intention of allowing her to marry a man they didn’t know and she’d just met. “The only thing I had going for me was my Armenian back-

Dadian was leaving church one day in March of 1993 when the cleric’s wife, Araxie Tatoulian, asked if he’d like to meet a young woman visiting from Syria. He agreed, albeit with some reluctance. “I had very low expecta- tions,” Dadian recalls. “I walked in, looked around and thought ‘Man, what am I doing here?’” He turned to leave — just as Ayda stepped through the door. “I was immediately captivated,” Dadian says. He credits Tatoulian as match- maker and facilitator for the whirlwind courtship that ensued. Eleven days after their first encounter, he floated the pros-

college tennis star “bounced around for a couple years,” work- ing mostly in sales. Unfulfilled, he backpacked through Europe and played in a few professional tournaments before a back injury ended his tennis career, after which he began studying to become a physical therapist. Then his life took an abrupt turn.

somewhere between threadbare cliché and stark improbability. That is, right up until the moment he met Ayda. After graduating from the University of San Diego with a business degree in 1989, the

ground,” Dadian says, “but I couldn’t have been more

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