When Andrew Alan Dietz stumbled across the Tinder profile of Philip George Melanson in June 2015, he instantly recognized him as a colleague in the Los Angeles page program at NBC Universal. Then Mr. Dietz froze.
“I got really nervous,” he said. “If I like him on Tinder and he doesn’t like me back, will that forever be weird? Would he see me and decline my like?” Before doing anything he might regret, he logged out of the app.
The two had first met weeks earlier, right when Mr. Dietz joined the page program, which Mr. Melanson had already been a part of for several months. The program, which now lasts a year, prepares participants for entry-level roles at the company.
Their cohort of pages was small — 20 to 30 altogether — so they all clung together, trying to project professionalism, in white Oxford shirts and distinctive blue blazers that broadcast their status to everyone at the studio. But at the cafeteria one day, very early in Mr. Deitz’s tenure, Mr. Melanson saw him in a different light when the actor Angelina Jolie walked by.
“He immediately lost all composure,” Mr. Melanson said. “His eyes went wide, his jaw dropped. He did everything but point at her. It was so earnest and so youthful.”
Not long after Mr. Dietz, now 29, had spotted Mr. Melanson, now 30, on the dating app, the two ended up sitting next to each other at an all-page dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe at Universal City. Mr. Dietz seized an opportunity.
“I asked, ‘Will you tell me a secret?’” he recalled. “Phil said, ‘I’ll give you two.’”
The first acknowledged an open-heart surgery that Mr. Melanson had as a young child.
“Which was not something I typically discuss,” Mr. Melanson said. Something about Andrew made me feel I could confide in him.”
Mr. Dietz was taken aback. “Please don’t tell me you have diabetes next,” he recalled replying. “Tell me something funny.”
Mr. Melanson’s second confession was that he had aspired to be a child actor, a hope that did not pan out. “A good thing in the end,” he said.
Mr. Dietz’s proffer in return was that he’d been cast once as a nudist extra, on a pilot for a show that didn’t advance past that episode. All was well and good until a college classmate spotted him on Hulu, where it aired, and gave him grief.
The following weekend, Mr. Dietz and Mr. Melanson went with a group of pages to Good Times at Davey Wayne’s, a bar in Hollywood, Calif. As they shimmied toward each other and exchanged flirtatious eye contact, a cheeky British page colleague said to them, “We know you both fancy each other, so why don’t you just snog already?”
It was all the impetus they needed. That date didn’t end for them until the following night, when they had to return to their respective homes and prepare for Monday morning in page garb.
A first dinner together a few days later was arranged through interoffice mail — the old-fashioned kind, delivered in a manila envelope. Mr. Melanson worried that it was a misappropriation of corporate resources, but not so much that he couldn’t see the romance in it.
“It was a week or two after that,” Mr. Melanson said, “that I accidentally blurted out that I loved him. He instantly reciprocated.”
The two now live in London, which is where they married on Aug. 4 at the Old Marylebone Town Hall. Elizabeth Waight, a registrar of marriages in London, officiated. About 60 vaccinated guests filled up the vintage red double-decker bus that carted them from the ceremony to the couple’s flat to the pub where they had a disco dance party complete with Bingo called by a performer named Lilly SnatchDragon.
Mr. Dietz, who graduated from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., is the executive assistant at Drama Republic, a scripted television company in London.
Mr. Melanson, who graduated from N.Y.U. and received a master’s degree with distinction in writing from the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, now oversees communications for Greenlit, a film industry start-up company in London. On Sept. 7, he is to begin as a part-time film and television lecturer in Boston University’s study-abroad program in the city.
The couple didn’t have a proposal preceding their marriage so much as they had a eureka moment, when a friend told them in early 2021, that she was receiving wedding invitations for 18 months into the future. Their parents and aunts had already started with small remarks about when they’d get married.
“There’s no great story here,” Mr. Melanson said.
Added Mr. Dietz, “We were like, August 2022 sounds like a good time. Let’s save the date.”
