A week before Nicole Saracino had surgery on her right ankle in May 2017, she logged onto her dating profile and clicked Stephen Hayman into her life.
“He was a real gentleman, very polite and very caring,” said Ms. Saracino, 30, who works in the northern part of Queens in New York as a pharmacy business consultant for Cardinal Health, a health care services company based in Dublin, Ohio. (She graduated from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy.)
“I thought he was adorable,” she said, “He had big blue eyes and a bright orange beard, and in one of his pictures he was in a motorcycle jacket. From the very start, all he wanted to do was nurse me back to good health.”
Mr. Hayman, 35, saw they had much in common and was equally impressed with her
“I thought she was beautiful, and very smart,” he said. “We also had much in common, we were both Catholic, and were huge Star Wars fans.”
Ms. Saracino added: “Whenever we go out to eat, we order different things and share, we do that about 99.9 percent of the time.”
By the Fourth of July, Ms. Saracino’s ankle was on the mend, and Mr. Hayman had swept her off her foot.
“Oh my goodness, he was my hero,” she said. “He took me out all summer, and when we went shopping for groceries, I would hop back and forth to his truck on crutches,” she said. “I just fell in love with him.”
She loved him more than Ralph’s Italian Ices in Bellmore, N.Y., where they went on their very first date. They had a conversation about theater, and “Kinky Boots” on Broadway in particular.
“I really, really wanted to see ‘Kinky Boots,’” Ms. Saracino said.
Mr. Hayman turned her dream into reality by telling her that he was already in possession of two tickets to the show. He had originally purchased the tickets for himself and another woman, with whom he had recently broken up.
Their fourth date took place a few days after Ms. Saracino’s surgery.
“Stephen came over to hang out with me, and my mom,” she said. “My mom wanted to make sure he was a nice guy before she was comfortable enough to leave her one-legged daughter alone with this stranger.”
“My mom soon realized that Stephen was a great guy,” Ms. Saracino said. “From the beginning he was like, ‘Oh you’re having surgery? That’s fine. I’ll hang out with you.’ No one has ever treated me with that level of respect.”
Mr. Hayman knew the feeling.
“As far as relationships go, it seemed as if I had always done everything for everyone else,” he said. “For the first time in my life, someone seemed to be doing everything for me.”
The couple got engaged in May 2019 at the Liberty Hotel in Boston, and the following month they purchased a home together in North Massapequa, N.Y.
They initially planned a wedding for Jan. 23, 2021, at Westbury Manor on Long Island, with 200 guests. But the coronavirus changed those plans, and they were married Feb. 20 at St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic Church in Oceanside, N.Y., before the Rev. James Donovan and 25 guests.
The bride and groom hosted a small reception after their wedding. She dined on short-rib rigatoni Bolognese and he on horseradish crusted filet mignon. It wasn’t long before they were soon sharing their meal with each other.
