Dillon Jones and Matthew McDermott were both relatively new to New York when they found each other on a dating app, in 2016. Once they met, they never looked back.
Both had moved to New York from Washington — Mr. McDermott for a job, Mr. Jones for a relationship, which didn’t work out — and both lived on the Upper East Side, just a few blocks apart. Their first date was at a place halfway between their apartments.
Mr. McDermott, 31, said that he fell in love when he first saw Mr. Jones, 30. “I believe it was the second he walked into the bar,” he said.
“I really liked his smile, to be honest,” Mr. Jones said. “He just seemed very charismatic.”
Mr. Jones also said that he didn’t want the night to end.
“After we had been talking for a few hours, I was seeing for sure that this is going somewhere, and I can’t wait to see where this goes next,” he said.
They soon became inseparable. “Probably after the first week, I thought, this is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with,” Mr. Jones said. “He likes to tell the story that we met for the first time, and then I never moved out, which is basically true.”
The two found they complemented each other: Mr. McDermott is outgoing, and Mr. Jones is more shy.
But, Mr. McDermott notes, Mr. Jones can warm any place up.
“We’ll go into a room together — a cocktail party, a restaurant — and by the end of the night, every single person in the room will know him because he has such a manner about him,” Mr. McDermott said. “He is really thoughtful and poignant in the way he engages with people.”
In addition to their differing personality types, “We come from entirely different worlds,” Mr. McDermott said. “I grew up right across the street from the water in Rhode Island, went fishing every weekend. Dillon grew up in Nebraska. They grow corn and soy, and they had cows. We’ve both, me in particular, brought those different backgrounds into our relationship. It’s created such an interesting dynamic.”
Mr. Jones graduated from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and was until June a first-grade teacher at Success Academy Bronx 4, in the Soundview section. Later this month, he is to begin as a fifth-grade teacher at Carl G. Lauro Elementary School in Providence, R.I., where the couple recently bought a home. Mr. McDermott graduated from George Washington University and is now a vice president at Whitman Insight Strategies, a polling company in New York.
Though he never really felt like he fit in while growing up in Nebraska, “which is very conservative,” Mr. Jones said, with Mr. McDermott he experienced an immediate sense of security. “A month after we started dating,” Mr. Jones said, “I met his parents for the first time. I knew he saw something in me and he wanted this to continue.”
On Aug. 7, the couple were married in an outdoor ceremony at the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown, Mass. Alex B. Morse, who is a friend of the couple, the town manager of Provincetown and a justice of the peace in Massachusetts, officiated. They had 125 guests (mostly vaccinated). The pair had intended to marry in August 2020, but postponed because of the pandemic.
“A month or two in, I knew this was my path,” Mr. Jones said. “This was who I’m supposed to be with, and I’m going to work on this to make it as perfect as it can be.”
