It was the worst of times, it was the best of times
Nathan Kemp was not thrilled when at 13 his family moved from Dallas to Arkansas for his dad’s job. Then he met Little Rock native Mary Kate Powers.
They were both eighth-graders at Pulaski Academy when he first arrived.
“We had one class together,” Mary Kate says. “It was a period where all the girls in our grade had P.E. except the girls who were in spirit squad. If you were on spirit squad you didn’t have to do a P.E. credit so the spirit squad girls were kind of scattered throughout the classes of all boys during this period and it was me and one other girl in his all-boys history class.”
Mary Kate sat in front of Nathan.
“We maybe said two words,” she says. “We would see each other in the hallways, obviously, but that was really the extent of it until we were in 11th grade.”
The beginning of their junior year brought a new perspective.
“That’s when he kind of had his glow up — and it wasn’t even just me noticing,” she says.
That year, they had physics together.
“We were doing all the little physics experiments that required partnering up, and that’s when things started to spark, if you will,” Mary Kate says.
She was on the dance squad and Nathan was on the basketball team. The dance squad cheered at the girls games, and then left before the boys games started. Mary Kate begged her coach a few times to let her stay behind so she could watch Nathan play rather than leaving with her dance squad.
In February 2010, he asked her to the winter formal.
“He texted me on our way back to school and was like, ‘Hey, hang out for a second. I want to chat with you before you leave to go home,’” she says.
They did a physics project together a week or so later, this time at her house.
“It was purely an excuse to hang out with her,” he says. “It was pretty awkward at first because we both knew we liked each other and didn’t really care about our physics stuff at the time.”
Mary Kate agrees about the awkwardness.
“I remember we were playing with rubber bands and we just kind of got through it, and he went to go home and that’s when he asked me to be his girlfriend,” she says. “From there it was all roses.”
They dated through graduation, and then dated long distance throughout four years of college; Nathan went to Boston University and Mary Kate went to the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
“I visited him every break we had, ran up my dad’s airline miles. He does a lot of business travel so I pretty much used all of them to go see Nathan,” she says. “He would come see me, too, but it was more fun to go to Boston.”
When they finished their bachelor’s degrees, both moved to Dallas.
“We started to talk marriage because it was almost 10 years since we had started this rodeo,” she says. “But he wanted to go to law school.”
Nathan prepared to leave for the University of Texas at Austin.
“It was a great school and a good opportunity for him, but I was like, OK. I am not doing this long distance thing again and not have a commitment, so we kind of agreed that we needed to be engaged before he went to school,” Mary Kate says.
She remembers complaining to her roommate that he was “never going to propose,” and hearing her roommate tell her to just give it a bit more time.
Nathan left for school the week before Labor Day 2018, but he came back to visit for Labor Day weekend.
“He was already planning to come back to Dallas to be with me and he ended up proposing that weekend,” she says.
Nathan had gathered their friends — and even Mary Kate’s parents — to meet them on the patio of their favorite restaurant to celebrate their engagement.
They were married on July 27, 2019, in St. James United Methodist Church in Little Rock. The wedding was followed by a reception in the ballroom of the Junior League of Little Rock Building.
They honeymooned in Spain and then Mary Kate moved to Austin.
“We were supposed to be there for a couple more years while he finished school but covid hit and we ended up coming back to Dallas a little bit earlier than we expected,” she says. “He went completely remote for the rest of school and I had a job offer back in Dallas.”
The Kemps welcomed a daughter, Mary Charlotte, in October 2023.
At 13, Nathan thought nothing good could come of leaving his friends in Dallas to move to Little Rock.
“Little did I know that a few years later I would end up meeting my wife,” Nathan says. “A little divine providence there. In the short term it seemed like the worst thing to have ever happened to me, but in the end it was actually the best thing to have ever happened to me.”