Breaking Out of the Friend Group and Forming a Family
Rachel Schallom and Brent Lobdell dated on and off for several years, and then there was a decision to change the dynamic.
Credit.Kristen Tomkowid | Little But Fierce Photography
By Nina Reyes
June 4, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
You might say that Rachel Schallom and Brent Lobdell met the old-fashioned way: Her best friend had a crush on his best friend, and so the two were introduced as a means of facilitating an entirely different romance. But when it came to the course of their own relationship, they broke with convention.
To begin with, they skipped the customary lead-up to a serious connection, after meeting at the University of Missouri in 2009 and spending the next seven years seeing each other on and off, almost always in a larger friend group.