Keziah Weir swam and bobbed around the water at Rockaway Beach on the southern edge of Queens in August 2014 while Daniel James Feller surfed playful waves on his white shortboard nearby. Their mutual friend, who Mr. Feller knew from high school, and Ms. Weir knew from Bard College, from which she graduated, introduced them earlier that day before they all got on the subway in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
“It was a great beach day,’’ said Mr. Feller, who graduated with high honors from Haverford College in Haverford, Pa., and received a doctorate in biomedical informatics from Columbia in May.
The three of them lived near each other in Bushwick, and at the beach compared notes about the neighborhood, and what they were up to.
Ms. Weir and Mr. Feller continued to socialize, usually with another friend or in a group, during the summer and by fall they began meeting every so often on their own at coffee shops in Bushwick to work on their laptops — she on a novel spanning several generations and on articles for Elle magazine, he on HIV-related research papers, and applications for graduate school.
“He was such a good motivator of the creative work I wanted to do,’’ said Ms. Weir, 28, and now a senior editor at Vanity Fair magazine in New York. Mr. Feller, 29, is the director of analytics at Rightway Healthcare, a technology health care navigation platform there.
In late Fall 2014 Mr. Feller moved to Far Rockaway, Queens where he had a backyard with surfboard racks, and a grill for barbecues.
“I definitely had a little crush on him for a long time,’’ said Ms. Weir, but they kept seeing other people.
In mid-March 2016 after Mr. Feller met Ms. Weir and her roommate at a bar in Bushwick, he stayed over on an air mattress in their living room.
The following morning at 8:30, he asked Ms. Weir to sit down.
“I have feelings for you,” he said.
Ms. Weir quickly suggested they go to Variety Coffee nearby to work. By the end of March she agreed to go on a date to a pub in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn, (she was dogsitting nearby), and they had their first official kiss. He then left for a surfing trip in Panama early the next day.
“I stayed in a treehouse with Rastafarians thinking of Keziah the whole time,” he said, and when he got back three weeks later they began dating seriously. Mr. Feller gave her a few surf lessons, while Ms. Weir introduced him to Nabokov’s novel “Pnin.” They moved into a Harlem apartment together in 2018.
“He’s filled with earnest wonder,’’ she said, and he described her as “very intellectual” and often tells her she is a “classic beauty.”
Mr. Feller told her he would propose after completing his Ph.D., but in May 2019 he surprised her as they walked in Central Park after he took a Lake Tahoe ski trip, and mentioned he brought her a giant pine cone.
“I’ll love you forever,” she said at one point during the walk, and he quickly reached into his pocket for what she expected to be the pine cone, but instead pulled out a ring.
“Can we get married,’’ he said, to which she recalled saying “‘really’ at least 90 times.”
They planned to get married on June 6 near the Burnett Fountain in Conservatory Garden in Central Park, with 60 guests, before the coronavirus outbreak. Instead they spent the morning with their puppy Fauci (a rescue from Tennessee) at a social justice march, along Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Later that day, they were married at the north end of Central Park with four attendees. Andrew Gethins, a Universal Life minister, officiated remotely, and the groom’s parents from Essex, Conn., the bride’s parents and brother from San Francisco and a few close friends watched the ceremony via Zoom.
