A Student Asked Their Professor How You Know You're In Love, And His Touching Answer Has Gone Viral

How can y'all ask your professors these personal questions. All my professors speed run through 6 chapters per lecture and ignore raised hands."

Dan West, 51, is an assistant professor and the speech and debate coach at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. He's leading two large introductory sections in communications this fall.

On the last day of one of his sessions, which was called "Introduction to Human Communication," West opened up the class to allow students to ask him any questions pertaining to their latest unit: love and relationships.

All the questions were written on notecards and completely anonymous, he said, which meant some questions were quite specific and personal.

One of the questions he received and read aloud was, "How do you when you're in love?"

"It just hits you, you can’t expect it and you can’t plan for it," West responded in a simple answer.

Then, he used his own story of falling in love with his wife Vicki in 1993 as an anecdote.

Dan West

"We had just come from a movie and stopped by a grocery store so I could buy some food for the next day. We were looking at ice cream and as I watched her choosing I realized that I was going to be buying groceries with her for the rest of my life," he told the class.

He proposed shortly afterward, and the two got married in September of 1993.

Victoria Helmke, 19, was one of the students in the lecture that day. She told BuzzFeed News the entire room melted in a sea of "aww"s, and a lot of students started smiling.

Helmke herself was so touched by the story that she shared it online "because it was something that I knew would make people happy," she said. Her tweet has gone massively viral, with now more than 76,