Kelly Ellen Mulrow and Kevin Matthew Quinn like clockwork recited the opening lines of the Latin textbook “Ecce Romani I” during their first date in May 2017 at Ampersand, a cocktail bar in the Gramercy neighborhood of Manhattan.
“She walked in the door with a huge smile,” said Mr. Quinn, who had connected with her on the dating app Hinge a couple of days earlier. “She had a warm glow, and a real friendliness to her.”
As soon as he reached out on the app he asked why she listed Roman emperors among her favorite things (she also listed hot sauce).
“It was very telling,” said Ms. Mulrow, especially since no one else bothered to ask, and in an exuberant reply she mentioned Roman history became her passion so much so that she studied classics at Yale, from which she graduated.
During the date, she appreciated, as did he, that he took six years of Latin at Rye Middle School and High School, and one of his teachers was David J. Perry, a contributor to “Ecce Romani” (“Look! The Romans”), and a name she knew.
“It was nice to have that connection,” said Ms. Mulrow, 31, now a project manager in digital strategy at Sotheby’s New York, who received a master’s degree in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at N.Y.U.
Although he was not as “enthused about the minutia,” she said, they had plenty else in common. They quickly learned that her squash buddy at Yale worked with him at Morgan Stanley. Mr. Quinn, 37, is now a vice president in New York in the securitized products division at Credit Suisse, the Zurich-based investment bank. He graduated from Lehigh.
“Kevin had a calming presence,” she said. “He was listening to me, and was very genuine.”
They met for drinks the next week on the Upper East Side, and the following week she squeezed in a third date before her flight to the British Virgin Islands for a two-week vacation with a few friends.
“When we got back I saw him the weekend after,” she said. “We were all in.”
They soon took long walks — his favorite pastime — around the city including a few from the Upper East Side down to Battery Park, and a couple of times ended up at the Dead Rabbit bar on Water Street. In Fall 2017 he met her parents on a chilly evening at an Italian restaurant along Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, where they had lots of pasta before a Fordham-Yale football game.
Mr. Quinn also indulged her on walks through the Roman and Greek art galleries on the ground floor at the Metropolitan Museum where they always stop by her favorite marble portrait bust of the Emperor Hadrian. In December 2018, they got an apartment together a few blocks from the museum.
In March 2019, during an early morning walk through Central Park, the weekend before businesses shut down because of the coronavirus, he proposed in a gazebo by the lake in the Ramble, and a few days later they planned to get married Nov. 14. (Ms. Mulrow is taking her husband’s name.)
“We proceeded even with the uncertainty of Covid,” Mr. Quinn said. “We just felt we wanted to get married.”
On Nov. 14 they were married at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan by Msgr. Robert T. Ritchie, the rector, and limited attendance to 50 guests, with 100 others via livestream. They later celebrated at the Water Club, a restaurant along the East River.
The couple also had rapid tests for all guests and vendors.
“We were super thoughtful doing testing and social distancing,” Ms. Mulrow said. Her father, Bill Mulrow, is a senior advisory director at Blackstone and a former secretary and campaign chairman to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. Mr. Mulrow is now a chair of New York Forward, an advisory board to help guide the state’s Covid-19 economic reopening strategy.
“I’m certainly a father thrilled for her and Kevin,” said Mr. Mulrow, who saw it as an “enjoyable, terrific day done safely following all state protocols.”
