Renata Certo-Ware and Tristan Graham, both 34, met in 2016, when she and her roommates at the time posted on Craigslist about an extra bedroom in their Philadelphia apartment for sublet.
“Tristan answered the ad,” she said. “He came, had his backpack on, and my first words when he left were, ‘We’ll never see that guy again.’”
A few weeks later, he moved in, and soon Ms. Certo-Ware and Mr. Graham found they had much in common. They cooked dinners together, stayed up late watching “Rome,” “Arrested Development” and “Game of Thrones,” and sometimes went out with the excuse that they needed to use up gift cards.
“We were looking forward to coming home and hanging out with our ‘roommate,’” said Ms. Certo-Ware, who had moved back to the Philadelphia area after a divorce. She is in charge of events and marketing at Dock Street Brewing Company, a Philadelphia craft brewery that was founded by her parents in 1985. She graduated from Boston University.
Mr. Graham, whose parents also live outside Philadelphia, said that he was not only looking for a place to live that wasn’t his parents’s house, but he was also looking for people his own age through whom he might find a network of friends apart from his co-workers. He had moved for a job with BDO International, an auditing firm where he is now a certified public accountant specializing in venture-partner fund audits. He graduated from Roanoke College in Salem, Va.
He said that he’d liked the apartment initially because it was walking distance to the train. The sublet he signed was for just three months. At its conclusion, Ms. Certo-Ware and Mr. Graham realized they were compatible even though they were not romantically involved. Their two roommates — a couple — were hoping for a quieter lifestyle, so the two singles decided to branch out and find a two-bedroom place.
A few days before their new lease began on a two-bedroom place in Philadelphia, Mr. Graham asked Ms. Certo if she’d like to join him at the U.S. Open Squash Championships at nearby Drexel University.
“I was playing it kind of coy,” he said. But when she offered to Venmo him the cost of the ticket, he said, “No, no! This is a date!”
After the event, he walked her to the home where she was temporarily staying and gave her a “proper good-night kiss,” she said. Two days later, they moved into their very own apartment.
Both say that it wasn’t awkward, and that their existing relationship buoyed them through potentially fraught transitional moments..
Though, Mr. Graham, an accountant whose parents, Cherryl Raynham Graham and Albert J. Graham III of Berwyn, Pa., are also both accountants, said that he perhaps should have put his professional mind to the matter.
“In hindsight, it would have been more fiscally responsible to tell each other how we felt before,” Mr. Graham said. “We never did use that second bedroom.”
The couple are to be married by Rabbi Rayzel Raphael on May 10, in the backyard of the house in Gladwyne, Pa., where the bride’s mother, Rosemarie A. Certo, and the bride’s stepfather, Mark C. Wieand, live, and where the bride grew up. She is also the daughter of Jeffrey D. Ware and stepdaughter of Dr. Adriana Angelina Ortega Gutierrez of Merida, Mexico.
They will use the surname Vesey after they are married, to extend the life of the groom’s grandmother’s maiden name, which else would be extinguished. The Vesey family crest includes the motto “Experto crede,” which loosely translates as, “Have faith in experience.”
