Sydney Spector, an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Hawaii, and Brock Glover, a Defense Department contractor, began dating a month after meeting through mutual friends in July 2013 in Honolulu.
At the time, Mr. Glover, 33, who served 10 years as an active duty officer in the Army, was stationed at Schofield Barracks, and Ms. Spector, 36, was clerking for U.S. District Judge Helen Gillmor.
After one year of dating, the couple’s time in Honolulu came to an end, but their lives together were only just beginning.
“We never talked about breaking up or anything like that,” said Ms. Spector, who was raised in Toms River, N.J. She graduated from Columbia and received a law degree from Emory.
“We just sort of braced for some unknown amount of distance,” she said, “and then we would figure it out from there as we went along.”
The couple embarked on what would become a four-year, long-distance relationship. During this time, Mr. Glover was stationed at various bases on the mainland and completed several deployments, while Ms. Spector worked at a law firm in New York.
“We knew my situation was unstable, but the goal was for me to eventually leave the Army and meet up with Sydney in New York,” said Mr. Glover, who graduated from the University of Toledo and grew up in Van Wert, Ohio.
“Absence and distance only made our friendship grow stronger,” he added. “My best friend was also my girlfriend, and that made a lot of complicated things so much easier to deal with.”
In April 2018, Ms. Spector, seeking to become an assistant United States attorney, noticed that such a post had come open — back in Hawaii.
“Brock and I always referred to our one-year together in Hawaii as our special, once-in-a-lifetime adventure,” she said, “but now there was an opportunity to go back, it was really hard to believe.”
A few months later, Ms. Spector was in Honolulu, working in the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Hawaii. Her adventure with Mr. Glover — who would soon complete a deployment to the Middle East and rejoin Ms. Spector in Hawaii — was now happening twice in a lifetime.
“We’re kind of building a home here,” said Mr. Glover, who was last stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C., having achieved the rank of captain promotable, and was honorably discharged by the Army in February 2019.
“We’re far from family and mainland friends,” he said, “but to be back in the place we met, well, it’s pretty special for us out here.”
They were married Aug. 23 at their Honolulu apartment by John V. Kamensky, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for the event, with family attending on zoom. (The couple had originally planned to marry on Feb. 13 at the Waialae Country Club in Honolulu with 130 guests and later at a private residence on the Big Island, but the coronavirus forced them to cast those plans aside.)
The couple’s viewing audience included the bride’s parents, Barbara Spector, a stay-at-home parent, and Dr. Stephen Spector, a retired periodontist in Shark River Hills, N.J., as well as the groom’s parents, Betsy Glover, a retired child care specialist, and Charles Glover, a retired United Methodist pastor in Newark, Ohio.
“We’ve been together seven years, but when Brock left the Army to be with me in Hawaii, it was the first time that we were actually joining our lives together in a real way, yet there were no doubts and no jitters,” Ms. Spector said. “After all we’ve been through, we have a love and respect for each other that has grown immensely.”
