This year, nearly 2.5 million weddings are expected to take place in the United States. That total, which comes from the Wedding Report, a trade group in Tucson, Ariz., is a bump not seen since 1984. If George Orwell had known that, he might have changed the plot of his classic novel “1984,” published in…
The photographs of trashed flowers still haunt florists. In 2020, when much of the world went into lockdown because of the pandemic, many flower farms’ crops were discarded. Since no one knew what was going to happen, new crops were not planted as usual. Now, because of pandemic-related supply chain challenges, labor shortages and poor…
Before the Omicron surge caused dozens of people to drop off the wedding guest list of Bryan Terrell Clark and Devario D. Simmons, it shut down “Thoughts of A Colored Man,” the Broadway show that counted Mr. Clark as a star and Mr. Simmons as costume designer. Mr. Clark hated not having the chance to…
When Rachel Seals matched with Elliott Averett on Bumble in October 2016, his profile referred to the rugged “Parks and Recreation” character Ron Swanson as a role model. “I told him it wasn’t very Ron Swanson-esque to be on a dating app,” Ms. Seals recalled. But he was very much an outdoorsman. Mr. Averett, 29,…
Stephanie Ann Quintero and Eric Michael Wall did not know each other when they walked out of a Dallas hotel along with 14 colleagues one morning in December 2018. Both employees of the accounting firm Deloitte — she in its Boston office, he out of Detroit — boarded a bus bound for a conference at…
Erik Braverman and Jonathan Cottrell’s wedding at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, where Mr. Braverman works as a senior vice president for the Los Angeles Dodgers, was a celebration of love. Also of progress. “We knew it would mean a lot to a lot of people,” Mr. Cottrell said, including the 75 vaccinated guests who…
Around that time, Mr. Winick had begun to write a blog called “30 Days of Mindfulness.” After drafting entries, he would send them to Ms. Vance for editing before he posted them. The blog became the basis for his second book, “The Plausible Path to the New Possibility,” self-published in February 2017, and a motivational…
“As corny as it sounds, when I was talking to Jason I felt like I had known him my entire life,” she said. He felt it, too. “At one point he said he felt like he had already been in my presence. I didn’t want to be overly forward, but I confidently said, ‘Well, why…
Frankie Sandmel met Elaina Marshalek in January 2017 while the two were at a retreat for Jewish activists in Berkeley, Calif. After pairing up for a get-to-know-you exercise, Ms. Marshalek, 31, said “there was definitely a spark” between her and Mx. Sandmel, who uses a gender neutral courtesy title. But before they could explore it,…
“After that it was just date, date, date, date,” he said. A few weeks later Ms. Stern accompanied him to a Persian-style Shabbat dinner at his parents’ house in Calabasas, Calif. She then began studying Farsi online, and did not shy away from difficult pronunciations such as “khayli khoob” (very good). Ms. Stern also grew…