Emma Imbrie Chubb and Matthew Joseph Cannell Cummings are to be married Sept. 1 at Penn Forest Natural Burial Park in Verona, Pa. The couple are to participate in a self-uniting ceremony.
Ms. Chubb, 35, is the inaugural Charlotte Feng Ford 1983 Curator of Contemporary Art at the Smith College Museum of Art. She graduated magna cum laude from Haverford College and received a Ph.D. in art history from Northwestern.
She is the daughter of Nancy H. Chubb of Verona and Charity J. Imbrie of Cheswick, Pa. The bride’s mother Ms. Chubb is a psychologist and a founder of Penn Forest Natural Burial Park. The bride’s mother Ms. Imbrie retired from her private law practice in Pittsburgh and is a vice president on the board of directors of the Persad Center, a nonprofit organization that serves the L.G.B.T.Q. community and people living with H.I.V. and AIDS.
Mr. Cummings, also 35, is an artist and preparator at the Smith College Museum of Art. He graduated from Bard and received a master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
He is a son of Gillian C. Cannell and John W. Cummings of Pittsburgh. The groom’s mother is a retired art historian who taught at colleges and museums in the Pittsburgh area. His father is the president of Cummings Construction in Pittsburgh.
The couple met and became friends in the fall of 1998 as freshmen at Taylor Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh.
As time passed, the pair kept in touch and, in 2012, their connection turned romantic. But marriage wasn’t something either had ever planned on. “Growing up, my parents couldn’t marry, and that came with a lot of hardship,” Ms. Chubb said of her two mothers. When same-sex marriage was legalized across the country in 2015, Ms. Chubb began to reconsider.
Mr. Cummings said “the availability of marriage to a wider population was a factor” in the two eventually deciding to get married.
Another situation also nudged them closer to marrying. On Sept. 5, 2018, Ms. Chubb fractured her shoulder while at a horseback-riding class. She was taken to a hospital emergency room, and Mr. Cummings rushed to be with her. “I thought, ‘Thank God these people in the hospital are O.K. with letting me in,’” he said. Being married, he said, “is a way we can make sure we can take care of each other.”
The following month, after Mr. Cummings and Ms. Chubb had made an offer on their first house and were awaiting a response, the idea of marriage was brought up again. “I said something like, ‘Well, I guess we should get married,’” he said. “It wasn’t like a get-down-on-one-knee moment. But that’s what feels right for our relationship.”
Their wedding ceremony will acknowledge the history of marriage inequality.
“We’ve lived in many different places and our community is spread out, so we’re making this about bringing our communities together,” Ms. Chubb said. “When else are the people you care about in one place? We’re thanking all the people that brought us here.”
