Ron Bel Bruno had at least 27 years of experience with internet dating, he said, when he encountered Dr. Edward Goldberg online in September 2016.
Both were on Fire Island at the time, though Dr. Goldberg (left), an internist and gastroenterologist in private practice in New York, was on call at a local clinic, so was on a sort of busman’s holiday. Unfortunately — maybe fortunately, the couple later decided — a tropical storm got in the way of their meeting up.
So, instead, just a few days after they found each other on Grindr, a gay dating app, they met for the first time at a Turkish restaurant in New York.
“It was instant. It was instant. It was instant,” Dr. Goldberg said.
Mr. Bel Bruno, now 56, said he had become jaded by the kind of dead-end dates he had found through social media, so had vetted Dr. Goldberg, now 58, for potential by talking to him “as a human being rather than just saying the stock, cliché phrases.”
“Ed seemed to really like what I was saying — he seemed to take it and run with it instead of giving me a blank screen,” said Mr. Bel Bruno, who is a freelance writer, editor and strategist for financial services and financial technology businesses.
Dr. Goldberg was taken by the fact that they were both from New Jersey, about the same age, and they easily got each other’s references.
Their hourslong dinner ended with the restaurant closing around them, and then Dr. Goldberg, who had ridden a Citi Bike to the date, offered to walk Mr. Bel Bruno to his car. He had been watching “The Millionaire Matchmaker,” he said, and had it in his head that “you’ve got to get a kiss on the first date.”
So when they got to Mr. Bel Bruno’s Mini Cooper, he said he had never been in one and asked if he could sit in it. “I leaned over and we started kissing,” he said.
For their next date, a few days later, Dr. Goldberg offered to make dinner for Mr. Bel Bruno. But as he prepared to leave his upstate house for the date, his car broke down.
Afraid that Mr. Bel Bruno would think he was being brushed off, Dr. Goldberg approached the matter scientifically. “I took a picture of the guy, to show that someone was actually working on the car,” he said.
The two had Thai shrimp together that night from Blue Apron. Both were already concluding that the other was special.
“I was experiencing something different, something very different, and when you’re 50-something years old and you think that, you take yourself more seriously,” Mr. Bel Bruno said.
By Dr. Goldberg’s birthday, on Oct. 1, he was in love, and it wasn’t long after that the two acknowledged to each other that their relationship would be serious. Within a year and a half, they had moved in together and, soon enough, they began talking about formalizing their bond.
“We’ve both been around the block,” Dr. Goldberg said. “We had spoken early on philosophically, and came to understand that we are old gay men, not young gay men, so we both believe in marriage.”
On July 31, the couple married in the yard of their weekend house in Taghkanic, N.Y., with Glenn Schermerhorn, a town justice in neighboring Copake, N.Y., officiating before 10 people. Later in the day, the couple had a second ceremony, with 34 different people, that was led by John Thomas Fischer, a friend of the couple.
