Though Marty Martinez has spent half his life in Boston and works as the city’s chief of health and human services, he wasn’t always sure finding total fulfillment in the city would be easy.
“The gay community in Boston is pretty small,” said Mr. Martinez, 42. “There’s a lot of college students, but for people who are older the community gets tighter. You start to know everyone.”
So, five years ago, Mr. Martinez went on the dating site Scruff. He met several men that year. Some looked nothing like their profile pictures. A few dates, he said, were “just horrible.” He kept trying to make a connection, though and at the end of the year, Matthew Hall found him.
“We have different versions of who chased who on the app,” Mr. Martinez said. “Matthew thinks I did it, but I’m pretty sure it was mutual.” A flurry of messages turned into a Dec. 12 date at Chops, a restaurant in Boston’s South End.
Mr. Hall, 32, is the finance manager of the Clubhouse Network, a nonprofit organization that matches underserved youth with adult mentors. When he and Mr. Martinez started flirting on Scruff, he was less settled professionally and personally. After graduating from Suffolk University in 2010 and working as a personal stylist at Saks Fifth Avenue, he had just found a job in finance at a Boston publishing company.
Mr. Martinez and Mr. Hall joke that they probably saw each other before Chops in Boston’s gay community. “But I didn’t have a beard then,” said Mr. Hall, whose beard is now voluminous. Even if he had (Mr. Martinez favors the bearded look as does Mr. Hall), they might not have hit it off. Before they met, Mr. Hall described himself to Mr. Martinez as “aloof.” Mr. Martinez is quite the opposite.
“I’m pretty verbose,” Mr. Martinez said. “I laugh loud. I talk loud.” Both are holdovers from his childhood in Omaha, he said, where he was raised by a single mother, Marian Martinez, and four older siblings in a lively Mexican-American household.
Mr. Martinez was no longer concerned about Mr. Hall’s possible aloofness when they met at the restaurant for their first date. “Matthew looked just like his picture,” Mr. Martinez said. “He had the big beard, and he’s very attractive and taller than me.”
More important, the conversation flowed. “It’s interesting because Matthew really is somewhat reserved, and I’m not, but that night it was just great. We talked about our lives and our families.”
They discussed work, too, including Mr. Martinez’s then recent promotion to chief executive of Mass Mentoring Partnership, the nonprofit organization he then worked for. “Matthew said I told him five or six times,” he said. “I was definitely proud. He thought I was trying to impress him.”
Even if he wasn’t, it worked. Mr. Hall, who grew up in Scarborough, Maine, with three older sisters, his mother, Christine Hall, and father, Gilbert Hall (who died in May after complications from a stroke), was inspired by Mr. Martinez’s commitment to Mass Mentoring. The group serves youth development programs across the state. “You could see how happy it made him to be doing that kind of work,” he said.
Mr. Martinez started helping his fellow Bostonians as soon he arrived in 1998 to get a master’s degree in urban and social policy at Tufts University. While taking classes, he worked 30 hours a week with teens at the Latin American Health Institute. He credits his mother with steering him toward public service. “All the activism and aggressiveness I could have ever wanted I got from my mother,” he said.
Before Ms. Martinez died after a monthslong illness in 2015, she was an advocate for Mexican-American veterans. Her father and brothers, including one who died in the Vietnam War, were all military men. “When we didn’t have any money at all, she would still donate to the church,” Mr. Martinez said.
At the end of their Friday Chops date, Mr. Hall was feeling an admiration as deep as his attraction to Mr. Martinez. After the restaurant, they went out for drinks, met with mutual friends, and headed back to Mr. Martinez’s apartment in the South End.
That weekend, they went for brunch and introduced each other to friends; Mr. Hall didn’t return to his own apartment in Dorchester until Sunday.
“We were spending a lot of time together,” Mr. Martinez said.
They met each other’s parents in the next few months.
“We decided we were very serious,” Mr. Hall said.
By the end of 2015, Mr. Hall moved into Mr. Martinez’s apartment and, motivated by Mr. Martinez’s service work, found a new job then as a finance specialist for the Unitarian Universalist Association, the religious denomination based in Boston. He was also making meaningful adjustments to his idea of what partnership should look like.
“I remember onetime we were sitting in this South End restaurant a couple months after we had met, and Matthew was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t envision spending holidays with my partner,’” Mr. Martinez said. “‘I see my family at holidays. I can see my partner the day after.’”
“Marty was like, ‘What are you talking about?’” Mr. Hall said. “And he was right. I had this mind-set like, I always go to Maine, I always do this or that.” Prioritizing a romantic relationship was a foreign concept.
Mr. Martinez, older and more experienced with long-term partnerships, took the lead on integrating their lives. “He would say, ‘I want you to come out with my friends,’” Mr. Hall said.
Showing up as a couple to outings with Mr. Hall’s friends was trickier. “I had mostly gay male friends when I met Matthew, and he had mostly straight female friends,” Mr. Martinez said. While Mr. Hall got to know Mr. Martinez’s friends during Saturday flag football games in the South End — “I was the cheerleader,” Mr. Hall said — Mr. Hall’s friends were less used to sharing him.
“It definitely felt that way at first,” said Baila Punch, who is among Mr. Hall’s longtime friend group. “But then we saw that Matthew was becoming more open because of Marty. He worried less about himself and more about other people. When we saw how in love he was, we knew it was the right path for him.”
In February 2016, Mr. Martinez surprised Mr. Hall on his birthday with what he called “a big gesture of love.” They went to a South End animal shelter and adopted Petey, their Manchester terrier mix. A year later, all three moved into a condo the men bought in South Boston and began making plans to travel together, and floating the idea of marriage.
But a trip to Europe they started planning in the middle of 2017 was upended when Boston’s mayor, Martin J. Walsh, called and offered Mr. Martinez the job he now holds.
“The funny part is I had just been awarded a fellowship that would have allowed me to go to Rwanda for two weeks and then take a three-and-a-half- month sabbatical,” Mr. Martinez said. The plan was to set aside six weeks of that sabbatical to explore Europe with Mr. Hall, who had already gotten the time off approved from his job.
Mr. Martinez, not wanting to turn down the fellowship, told him the timing wasn’t right. The mayor called again. “Matthew and I shared the decision,” Mr. Martinez said. “We spent a lot of time sitting in our kitchen, thinking.”
“The level of impact he could make in that position was so large, his mom would have told him to take it,” Mr. Hall said. In fact, Mr. Martinez’s impact is broad in his work for the city. He oversees several departments and offices, including the Health Commission, Centers for Youth and Families, Veterans Services, the Disability Commission, the Office of Fair Housing and Equity, the Office of Food Access and the Office of Immigrant Advancement.
“My life got crazy busy, with community meetings almost every night,” Mr. Martinez said. “Matthew’s been such a sport about it.”
By the time they headed to San Francisco to celebrate Pride Week with friends in the summer of 2018, they had already shopped for rings at Tiffany on Newbury Street. But Mr. Hall wasn’t expecting a proposal that week. And he was apprehensive when a stranger gripping pink balloons showed up and started snapping pictures of the couple as they took in the views on a hike in San Francisco’s Twin Peaks.
Mr. Martinez, of course, had hired her to capture the moment when, on June 23, he got down on one knee and asked Mr. Hall to marry him. The balloons were the signal to let Mr. Martinez know she was the photographer he had hired from Boston.
On Oct. 18, as twilight fell over Boston, the city they love, they were married downtown at the State Room before 125 guests. Mr. Martinez and Mr. Hall, wearing custom charcoal suits from Indochino and burgundy ties, walked down a staircase that afforded grand views of Boston’s skyline. Mr. Martinez, who descended first, was escorted by his sisters, Carole Cruse and Bobbie Martinez; Mr. Hall was accompanied by his mother. Eight groomsmen and women dressed in charcoal suits and burgundy dresses flanked the officiant, Erika Argersinger, a friend who received permission to marry them from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
In handwritten vows, Mr. Martinez described himself as “excited, nervous and ready.” “You’re the man who has made me a better person,” he added.
During his turn, Mr. Hall said, “You are the extrovert to my introvert, the big to my little. I want to be your husband as long as we both shall live.”
With the power vested in her, and to joyful whoops from the assembled, Ms. Argersinger made it so.
ON THIS DAY
When Oct. 18, 2019
Where The State Room: a Longwood Venue in Boston
Tradition At the end of the ceremony, Mr. Martinez’s brother, Robert Martinez, draped a Mexican lasso over the couple’s shoulders to form an infinity symbol and mark the everlasting nature of their union.
Boss on the Premises The night before the wedding, the couple held a rehearsal dinner and cocktail party at Parkman House, the mayor’s official residence. After the ceremony, Mayor Walsh, who had another commitment and couldn’t attend the wedding, stopped by a reception at the State Room to offer the couple private congratulations. “I told him, Don’t call me! I’m off for a week,” Mr. Martinez said, laughing.
Safe Bet Mark Scialdone, one of the groomsmen, is a divorce lawyer. “They are such an obviously in love couple,” he said. “I don’t feel like I’d ever have to represent either of them.”
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