When Andrew Katz decided to accept a job in Washington in the summer of 2015, Marysa Greenawalt, his girlfriend of eight months, was concerned about being in a long-distance relationship. But not for herself.
“I think early on, because Andrew doesn’t have a relationship history, I wasn’t sure how he would end up feeling about long-distance dating,” said Ms. Greenawalt, who left a longtime boyfriend to be with Mr. Katz and wasn’t kidding when she said that he had no dating history.
“I was never in a relationship before,” said Mr. Katz, 34.
The two were colleagues at Time magazine in New York when Mr. Katz accepted the job offer from The Washington Post as a digital editor on its foreign desk. She was living in Brooklyn, he in Manhattan.
“We were looking ahead to a lot of time and money spent, and a lot of back and forth trips on Amtrak,” said Ms. Greenawalt.
“I was always very big into my professional career,” Mr. Katz said. “I put everything into it, and didn’t do much dating. Looking back, I really wanted that job in Washington, but I wanted Marysa as well.”
A graduate of the University of Maryland, he received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia. Ms. Greenawalt graduated from the University of Missouri.
As it turned out, Mr. Katz lasted only six months at The Post. “Things just weren’t right,” he said. “I needed to get back to Marysa.”
Fortunately for Mr. Katz, he was able to return to New York in December 2015 as he was rehired by Time magazine to work in a photo editor capacity on a team that included Ms. Greenawalt. (He is now the deputy director of photography at Time magazine; she is a freelance photo editor at The New York Times.)
“Looking back, if I could take back the whole long-distance thing, I would,” said Mr. Katz, who worked as a reporter at Time magazine when he first met Ms. Greenawalt in January 2014 at Houston Hall, a beer garden in Manhattan, during a work friend’s going-away party.
“We worked on separate teams at Time back then,” Mr. Katz said. “Marysa was a member of the photography department and I was a reporter who occasionally wrote for the department’s photography blog.”
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They were chatting in mixed company at the going-away party until the conversation belonged to just the two of them.
After the party, Ms. Greenawalt told her roommate that she had met someone special.
In the ensuing months, Ms. Greenawalt and Mr. Katz remained friends, and on a chilly night in Sept. 2014, while the two of them were installing an outdoor photo exhibit at Photoville in Brooklyn, he noticed that she was cold.
Mr. Katz promptly removed his jacket and was about to hand it to Ms. Greenawalt, who refused him several times before accepting his warm offer.
“I was touched by his sweetness,” she said, “and that’s when sparks started to fly between us.”
That same night, they went to dinner with friends, then walked, just the two of them, along the Brooklyn waterfront, where Ms. Greenawalt told Mr. Katz that she had feelings for him. She also had a boyfriend.
Mr. Katz surely felt the same way, but as long as Ms. Greenawalt had a boyfriend, all he could do was play the waiting game.
The wait was over in November 2014, when Ms. Greenawalt became single and Mr. Katz officially became a part of her relationship history.
“If I have to, I can be a very loud, strong-willed person,” said Ms. Greenawalt. “Andrew is the only person I ever dated who I haven’t clashed with yet.”
The couple had planned to marry Sept. 26, 2020, in front of 150 guests at the Prospect Park Boathouse in Brooklyn, but their plans were spoiled by the coronavirus.
They were wed Oct. 24 before 90 vaccinated guests at the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn. Jeffrey Kaufman, a Universal Life minister, officiated.
“I have always felt like Andrew was right there for me whenever I needed him, but in a way that most other people I had met in the city could not,” the bride said of the groom a week after they were married. “And he knows that if he ever needs me, I’m there for him.”
