With Thanksgiving marking the unofficial start of engagement season — late November through Valentine’s Day is when marriage proposals are common — ring buying is top of mind for many couples considering marriage. The four Cs — carat, cut, color, and clarity — have traditionally been used to evaluate diamonds. Now, couples buying diamond engagement…
Submissions have been edited for length and clarity. A Museum Meet-Cute I was visiting Washington, D.C., and randomly decided to go to the National Gallery of Art. I caught myself looking at a girl, and she must have been looking at me, too. We both smiled at each other. Emboldened, I asked her to take…
That summer each got to know the other’s family. Ms. Rosensweig’s parents, Linda and Daniel Rosensweig, live in Manhattan and keep a vacation house in Montauk, N.Y. Weekends there and in New Jersey with Mr. Pontrelli’s parents, Wendy Butler and Jay Pontrelli, who are divorced, added a layer of certainty about their compatibility. “The family…
Austin J Mills said he remembered Taylor Beverly Mills, then Taylor Dordick, as “the popular older girl with the quarterback boyfriend” when they were both students at Beverly Hills High School in Beverly Hills, Calif., in 2010. At the time, Mr. Mills, now 30, was a junior and a star basketball player, and Mrs. Mills,…
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.] Mr. Scarvelis, who graduated from U.C.L.A. with a bachelor’s degree in English, is a track and field coach specializing in throwing events for the University of California San Diego. Ms. Zappia, who graduated from San Francisco State University with a bachelor’s degree in history, is a…
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.…
In 2014, Naina Rishiraj’s uncle died from a heart attack at 60. He had been working his entire life with the dream of traveling the world once he retired. But, despite being “fit as a fiddle,” Ms. Rishiraj said, he passed away suddenly and never got to live that dream. It was an awakening for…
In November 2020, Andrew Quintero rented Blu Mar, a seafood restaurant in the Hamptons, to host a large dinner party in hopes that Sophia Farah Babai would attend. That night he watched Ms. Babai’s friends walk in, but she wasn’t among them. Again. “I was always hoping that she would show,” Mr. Quintero said. Mr.…
Kimberly Lauren Stokes and Dexter Clay Mason did not meet until adulthood, but their paths could have crossed much earlier in life. Ms. Stokes and Mr. Mason are both from Detroit. Both were members of Jack and Jill of America, a social organization for Black families. Both of their mothers, who happen to be former…
During the 2018 production of “Ragtime” for the AfterWork Theater in Manhattan, Molly Antoinette Shoemaker and Cody James Wymore were determined to keep things professional. She was the show’s director and he, the music director. Their interaction, however, went beyond professional for Mr. Wymore. He brought in leftover meals like Dijon chicken and cheeseburgers for…