Woman Finds Unexpected Note from Husband in Her 9th-Grade Yearbook 

Sarah Wilder Hecht and her husband, Steven Hecht, first became friends in high school, often ending up seated next to each other in class.

After graduating in 2005, they drifted apart. Years later, in 2013, they ran into each other again at a festival in Atlanta. Not long after, they began dating — and in 2017, they got married.

Soon after the wedding, Sarah took a nostalgic trip through her old keepsakes and ended up finding something she never saw coming.

“We were at my parents’ house, and I was like, ‘I wonder if we have any pictures together in high school,’ because we were friends,” Sarah, 39, says.

While flipping through her ninth-grade yearbook, she came across a note Steven had written more than 15 years earlier.

“Sarah, it’s too bad school is ending and I don’t get to hear your incoherint (mispelled) [sic] rambling anymore. Have a good summer and try not to think as hard as this guy. See ya next year, Steven,” the message read — complete with an arrow pointing to a stressed-looking student on the page next door.

“I was looking through it, and I saw that, and I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, that is so funny. I need to keep that forever,’” Sarah says.

Steven’s reaction surprised her too — but for a different reason.

“He was like, ‘I don’t remember writing that. I would never spell those words wrong,’” she says. “I was like, ‘Here it is. It’s history. It’s part of history.’”

Sarah can’t remember exactly what she wrote in Steven’s yearbook back then, but she jokes it was probably “a whole dissertation.”

“I loved him in high school. I thought because he was so quiet, and I just thought he was the funniest thing,” she says. “I was like, ‘Who acts like this? Who keeps to themselves?’ So I’m sure I did.”

Now parents to 5-year-old twin boys, the couple will each turn 40 this year. They’ll also celebrate their ninth wedding anniversary in May.

Even after more than a decade together, Sarah suspects their high school classmates might still be surprised they ended up as a couple.

“I think our high school friends are probably shocked that we’re together, but he’s very shy, he’s very quiet, as you can tell from his post,” she says. “I’m outgoing, I’m the talkative one. But it’s a good balance.”

Sarah later shared a video of the yearbook note on TikTok, where it drew more than 122,000 views.

“All that trouble just to marry the guy who wrote this in my 9th grade yearbook,” she wrote on the video, adding in the caption, “He was clearly smitten from the start.”

She says she didn’t expect how differently people would interpret the message.

“Some people are like, ‘Oh, he liked you.’ I like to err on the side of, ‘Oh, he liked you,’” she says. “I thought that was funny. It’s such a funny way to show who we were in high school is still who we are today.”

Steven insists he didn’t have a crush on her back then — but Sarah isn’t totally convinced.

“He says no, but I mean, look at that. Obviously, he did, and we got to pick where we sat, and he sat next to me, so he liked me,” she says.

Looking back now, Sarah feels the note says more than Steven probably meant it to at the time.

“What he wrote then is just so true of what is now,” she says. “He’s a great soundboard for me and clearly has always been, and just someone that I’ve always felt comfortable sharing anything and everything with, whether it’s coherent or incoherent. He’s a great husband.”