Ewodaghe Omoligho Harrell and Henry Hugh Adams were married Aug. 17 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in Denver. James Bassett, an associate justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court and an uncle of the groom, led the self-solemnizing ceremony.
The bride, 31, who will take her husband’s name, is an aide to Representative Joe Neguse, Democrat of Colorado. She graduated from Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and received a master’s degree in public health from Brown.
She is a daughter of Adetutu J. Harrell and Donald G. Harrell of Winter Garden, Fla. The bride’s father is an adjunct history professor of Africana studies at the University of Central Florida and an adjunct humanities professor of African-American humanities at Valencia College, both in Orlando. Her mother is the owner and chief executive of Orisirisi African Folklore, a performing arts company based in Winter Garden.
The groom, 34, is an assistant professor of mathematics at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. He graduated from Stanford, from which he also received a Ph.D. in mathematics.
He is a son of Dr. Sallie O. Adams and Dr. Jessie W. Adams of Sacramento. The groom’s mother is an endocrinologist at the Sutter Health diabetes services center in Roseville, Calif. His father, who is retired, was a hematologist-oncologist for Kaiser Permanente in Sacramento.
The couple met through the dating app Bumble, while the bride was studying public health at Brown and the groom was attending a mathematics conference in Providence, R.I. They didn’t meet, though, until after the original 24-hour window for communication granted by the app dwindled. “We matched, but then the 24 hours went by, and she let me expire.”
But he decided to give her a second chance with another 24 hours.
Ms. Harrell, who had been urged just a few days earlier by her then-roommate, Prabhdeep Kehal, to “download an app and start swiping,” noticed that Mr. Adams’ profile mysteriously reappeared on her screen a day after she let their matching window expire. “How’d this guy get back here?” she asked her roommate. Still, impressed by his persistence, she decided to send a message, and they arranged for a first date at a bakery and restaurant in Providence.
“We set up a date at Duck and Bunny, however, it was right next door to the brewpub where all of my conference friends went after the math workshop, and so we were having beers, and I was really worried,” Mr. Adams said. “It’s hard to have a first date when there are people that you know in the same shop. So I texted Ewo, and I said, ‘Can we move locations?’”
Ms. Harrell was surprised he was so honest about his reasoning for changing the date location.
After that date, she invited him to return to Providence a few weeks later, and the two began to date exclusively.
Though Mrs. Adams was “just swiping,” as she described it, leaping quickly into a relationship wasn’t new in her family. The day the bride’s mother met her father, he told her, “I’m going to marry you.” Three weeks from the day they met, the couple were married.
Even though Ms. Harrell fell in love fast like her parents, she and Mr. Adams, unlike her parents’ story, began a long-distance romance. The couple lived in separate cities around the United States and the majority of their time spent together happened while attending the weddings of their friends. They’ve attended 14 weddings, including seven during their first year as a couple.
“Because we had so many weddings, we rarely had to plan our own trips. We didn’t really have to coordinate schedules,” Ms. Harrell said. They knew if they waited two weeks or so they’d be seeing each other again at another celebration.
For their own wedding, the couple made it a mission to borrow their favorite ideas from the hodgepodge of ceremonies they’ve attended since early 2017.
At a “beautiful wedding at an expensive hotel in Chicago,” Ms. Harrell recalled the bride and groom telling the room full of guests that they’d like to “get to the point,” beginning and concluding their ceremony in less than two minutes in order to get to the reception. “After that, we’re definitely going to have a short one, too,” she said.
But short ceremony or not, their wedding of 200-plus guests had to be “big,” Ms. Harrell said. “If you’re Nigerian, marriage is the Super Bowl for Nigerian mothers.”
