About four years ago, David Strauss was separated but not yet divorced when he and a friend, having just finished playing tennis in Mamaroneck, N.Y., decided to have a bite to eat at the yacht and tennis club.
Mr. Strauss’s friend recognized a couple, Susan and Stephen Flaxman, at a table, and the two men sat down to join them.
“Susan proceeds to grill me for the next five to 10 minutes,” said Mr. Strauss, now 61. “’Who are you? What do you do?’ Then she says, ‘You must meet Jill.”
Mrs. Flaxman was referring to Jill Meltz, her very close friend since 1998, when they were in their 30s and both single and dating and living in New York. She wasted no time contacting her friend.
“So she called me and said, ‘OK, I just met the greatest guy: He’s really smart, very kind, he’s warm, he’s successful, seems to be a very good father and he’s very good looking’” said Ms. Meltz, now 54. “She said, ‘What else do you need to know?’ and then she hung up, and called back two seconds later and said, ‘You’re going to go out with him and you’re going to like him.’”
A couple of weeks went by, and Ms. Meltz had not heard from Mr. Strauss. She wrote him off.
“Then, obviously, he did call,” she said. Ms. Meltz is the director for jewelry and watch advertising sales at Departures, a magazine for American Express’s platinum cardholders.
The two met for drinks, and were each so taken with the other that they ended up having dinner. They shared their first kiss there, and then shared a second kiss after he walked her home at the end of the night.
“I found her attractive and smart and witty and engaging and very warm, incredibly warm,” said Mr. Strauss, who is a principal partner in Broadband Success Partners, a telecommunications consultancy in New York.
“The conversation just flowed,” Ms. Meltz said. “I’ve been out with so many men who wanted to brag about what they owned, where they’d been skiing, and he did none of that. He genuinely cared about hearing about me.”
A second date soon followed, and within a few months, Ms. Meltz realized that she regretted the holiday trip to Argentina that she and a friend had planned because it would mean that she wouldn’t be with Mr. Strauss over the holidays. “That’s when I decided I really don’t want to live without this guy.”
“It feels so comfortable, so easy, so natural, that it was just a feeling of ‘we belong together,’” Mr. Strauss said. “Every day — it’s just spontaneous — we say to to each other, ‘I love you.’”
Last year, for Ms. Meltz’s birthday, Mr. Strauss planned a proposal at the Leopard at des Artistes that culminated with prosecco for every one of the restaurant’s guests. “It was such a Woody Allen moment, so beautiful, and all these people were so happy for us,” Ms. Meltz said.
On July 12, the couple were married at the Harrison, N.Y., home of Mrs. Flaxman and her husband, Stephen Flaxman. Steven J. Usdan, a Universal Life minister, officiated remotely, using a video link, and Rabbi Stephen H. Pinsky, who also joined the wedding through a video link, led the ceremony. About 200 other people participated on Zoom.
The wonder of their unanticipated introduction is still with both, four years later. “I was just very, very fortunate — it so easily could not have happened,” Mr. Strauss said. “It’s pretty magical.”
“Had Susan not set me up with him, I would have never met him,” said Ms. Meltz, who will use Meltz Strauss as her surname. “There’s a Yiddish word, ‘bashert.’ It was meant to be.”
