Sarah Casey Botwinick and Jason Gabriel Pollack were undergraduates at Lehigh University at the same time, though they didn’t meet until post-college, in February 2020, on the dating app Hinge. At first, “it was slow going,” Mr. Pollack said. “It took her a week to answer my messages. I would answer immediately.”
“It’s Hinge,” Ms. Botwinick explained. “There are a lot of matches.”
They began messaging on the app and also exchanged Snapchat handles.
But just as things were getting good, things in the world started getting bad as Covid began to take hold. On March 7, 2020, just days before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, Ms. Botwinick left her apartment and roommate in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and went to stay with her parents in West Caldwell, N.J. Mr. Pollack remained in his Murray Hill apartment.
Despite the pandemic, their connection took off.
“We snapped every day,” Mr. Pollack said of their messages and photos on the social media platform, sometimes of their runs. “Like a 75-day streak.”
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Then, on March 23, Mr. Pollack sent one message that was a game changer. “He snapped me, ‘Can I have your number?’” Ms. Botwinick said. She said yes.
The two stayed in touch on FaceTime and Snapchat and had virtual binge-watching sessions of streaming programs. “We watched so many shows,” Ms. Botwinick said.
“At this point, we knew each other so well because we had these marathon calls,” she added. It was time to take the virtual connection for a spin in the real world.
In mid-April 2020, Ms. Botwinick made plans to see a new apartment in Manhattan. She invited Mr. Pollack to accompany her.
During the tour, they began to hear sirens and someone yelling, “Fire! Fire! Everyone evacuate!” So they did. Ms. Botwinick did not take the apartment.
“We didn’t really define what we were going to do after,” Ms. Botwinick said. “So I said, ‘Do you want to go to my apartment?’” They made their way to her apartment in Chelsea. “We walked in, and we hugged, and he asked if he could kiss me.”
A week or so later, she returned to the city to see more apartments. Mr. Pollack joined her. And in late May 2020, Ms. Botwinick said that Mr. Pollack asked her to be his girlfriend over spaghetti and meatballs they made at her apartment “and cheap red wine.”
In June 2020, Ms. Botwinick moved to a new apartment in Chelsea, without roommates, and about a year later, in July 2021, the couple got their first place together, an apartment in the Turtle Bay neighborhood, where they still live today.
Mr. Pollack proposed on March 24, 2023, at the Rink At Rockefeller Center, where he works as a search engine optimization manager at NBCUniversal. He planned the surprise for months, walking past the very spot nearly every day.
On the last weekend skating was available, he suggested they skate. After 45 minutes on the ice, everyone was asked to clear the rink, presumably for cleaning.
“She’s a huge rule follower and started to go,” Mr. Pollack said. “I started skating to the center. She’s like, ‘Come on. Let’s go this way.” Mr. Pollack urged her to come with him instead.
When they got to the center, he dropped to one knee. “I said yes,” Ms. Botwinick said, “and then he said, ‘Can you please help me up?’”
Ms. Botwinick, 27, is a developer relations engineer at Google. She has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and business and grew up in West Caldwell.
Mr. Pollack, also 27, holds a bachelor’s degree in English. He is from Roslyn, N.Y.
The couple were married in a Jewish ceremony on Sept. 1 by Rabbi Ari Lucas, senior rabbi at Congregation Agudath Israel in Caldwell, N.J., at the Pleasantdale Château in West Orange, N.J. About 250 people attended.
Mr. Pollack’s grandfather, Roy A. Rosenberg, was a rabbi whose death in 2001 was covered in The New York Times. Rabbi Rosenberg’s ordination Kiddush cup was included in the ceremony, as was the tallis of Ms. Botwinick’s grandfather, Melvin Benovitz.
During the ceremony, Rabbi Lucas noted that it was a difficult day for many Jewish people since news had broken that morning that six Israeli hostages had been killed by Hamas. “Yet, even in these difficult times, it is still important for us to celebrate in these shared simchas,” Mr. Pollack said, referring to the “joining of Jewish families and these happy celebrations that carry on our beloved traditions.”
