When a Love Expert Falls in Love

In 1994, John Tierney followed Helen Fisher around the American Museum of Natural History, hoping she could put the Manhattan singles scene into perspective for him. She came through solidly. “I’ve been quoting her since then, for decades,” he said. “Helen always has something smart and quotable to say on love.” Dr. Fisher, an author,…

Finding Love at First Glance

Katherine Desmond was the local in a group of engineering interns at DuPont, the chemical company in Wilmington, Del., when she and Pedro Henrique Martins met in 2014. After the two initially met at a luncheon, Ms. Desmond, who grew up in Wilmington and whose mother retired as the chief financial officer of DuPont, made…

Finding Love After Divorce

A common experience of divorce seems like an unlikely origin for a love story, but so it was for Raj Sardesh and Alexander Seidel. Mr. Sardesh (left) and Mr. Seidel were in the throes of parting from marriages when they met in 2008. Both were also in the process of coming out as gay men.…

The Setup That Lasted Six Years

Since 2010, mutual friends had been trying to set up Permele Doyle with William Robinson, who is known by his middle name, Garner. Despite those efforts, Ms. Doyle, 33, the president and founder of Billion Dollar Boy, a digital marketing agency with offices in New York and London, and Mr. Robinson, 37, the chief executive…

Who Could Forget That Smile?

Shanavia Thomas, a 29-year-old insurance claims adviser, was working in Hamilton, N.J., on a summer day in 2017 when, she said, a familiar smile “just lit up the entire office.” That smile belonged to Cianni Pitt-Matthews, now 24, who had just been hired at the CSAA Insurance Group, a company based in Walnut Creek, Calif.,…

The Solar System Winked

When Ilana Ozernoy was a young girl growing up in the Soviet Union, her father, Leonid Ozernoy, a prominent astrophysicist in Moscow, bought her a telescope. Ms. Ozernoy and her father, who was a scientist at the P.N. Lebedev Physics Institute in Moscow, along with her older sister and mother, would spend summers in the…