On a summer evening in a previous century, Garrett Foster, then 27, summoned up his courage and entered a gay bar for the first time. At the Brook in Westport, Conn., which, until it closed, was the oldest continually operating gay bar in the country, he laid eyes on Brian Murray, then 31. Mr. Murray…
Date No. 2 took a while. But at the bar at the Baccarat Hotel in late April, Ms. Katz decided she shouldn’t have waited so long to reconnect with him. “He was so adorable and so smart, and his texts to me were so thoughtful,” she said. Weeks later, on June 10, they declared themselves…
In 2014, Derek Owens and Chelsea Segal randomly sat next to each other at the orientation session for their two-year stint in the Peace Corps. “Two of you will get married, it always happens,” the facilitator told the cohort of 48 people on the crest of their placement in Panama. “I was certain it would…
Mosheh David Oinounou and Alexandra Lauren Sall were shushed a few times as they whispered nonstop during a hefty lineup of talks on pastrami, knishes and other Jewish foods on their first date in October 2018. It took place at an annual event sponsored by the Jewish Food Society at the Angel Orensanz Center on…
A little shark-bait subterfuge was necessary, Chris James judged, to get Anthony Gavranic into exactly the right spot for a sunrise proposal at Waimanalo Bay on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. It was April, and the two were having a post-vaccination vacation at a place they’d visited and loved just before the coronavirus pandemic arrived…
The entire world, it seemed, knew that Taylor Hollenkamp had received a marriage proposal. It was written about in The New York Times, during a Thanksgiving six-word challenge last November. Lauren Few, now 36, had lots to be grateful for, most notably her partner, Ms. Hollenkamp, whom she had met the previous December through a…
It took him nine months. But on a rainy morning in March 2016, in the Rittenhouse neighborhood of Philadelphia, the man known as “the hot doctor” by all the girls on the block finally asked out the girl he apparently had noticed a few months after she had moved into the brownstone just one door…
Connor May originally planned to propose to Kaitlin Brown, his girlfriend of three years at the time, after they had finished swimming 1.2 miles, cycling 56 miles and running 13.1 miles together. Competing in a half-Ironman triathlon, he thought, would be an important milestone and a fitting preamble to their engagement. Without revealing his ultimate…
In August 2019, Anna Freimuth, the daughter of Matthew Freimuth, was unofficially wed to one of her stuffed animals, a plush pink dog that has no name. Mr. Freimuth and his then-boyfriend, Adam Rogers, performed the ceremony, which was held on the back deck of a rented house in East Hampton, N.Y. Mr. Freimuth and…
Mason McDowell went to a Wichita, Kan., job fair in March 2020 expecting his hands to get sweaty and his throat to go dry for the usual reasons. The competition was considerable, and he hoped to walk out with an offer to put his elementary school teaching credentials to use. “I remember thinking, OK, I’m…