While working as a bartender, Ms. Johnson freelanced as a marketing consultant. In September 2020, she started her own company, Changing Tides Media. This year, she joined PracticeBloom, a marketing agency based in Clifton, N.J., as a director of accounts.
During their time apart, Mr. Wheeler realized that if he ran his own business, he would have more control over his life than as someone’s employee. So, in June 2019, he bought a boat. Then, it all clicked. “I figured out that I really want to be with her,” he said.
The following month, he was in New Jersey and decided to tell Ms. Johnson his feelings. Mr. Himmelreich invited him and Ms. Johnson over for drinks. When he saw Ms. Johnson, Mr. Wheeler said, “I couldn’t stop looking at her and she couldn’t stop looking at me.” They got back together that day.
Two years later, on a rainy evening in August 2021, Ms. Johnson boarded Mr. Wheeler’s boat, “Euphoria,” which was docked in Longport, N.J. They would have drinks there before heading out for an anniversary dinner. When Mr. Wheeler suggested they sit on the deck and that she leave her rain jacket inside, Ms. Johnson wondered if he was “losing his mind.”
Outside, he proposed. Ms. Johnson said “yes” immediately. “I would have married Ricky back in 2017,” she said. “I felt a very deep, meaningful, but effortless connection with him. No matter where we were, he always felt like home.”
Her parents, brothers and his mother, Johanna Wheeler, arrived on the dock, carrying champagne. The group met up with even more family members — Ms. Johnson’s cousins, aunts, uncles — as well as friends. Together, they took a party bus to the Whitebrier restaurant in Avalon. “It was a wild night,” with partying that went well into the morning hours, Mr. Wheeler said.
