Lisa Patrice Goldstein and Peter Andrew Nosal were married April 20 at the Providence Public Library in Providence, R.I. Sister Margaret Dempsey, a Roman Catholic nun and the bride’s great-aunt, became a Universal Life minister to officiate at the event.
The bride, who is 32 and taking her husband’s name, is an associate specializing in investment funds at Proskauer Rose, a law firm in Manhattan. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Vermont and received a law degree, also magna cum laude, from George Mason University. She serves on the board of directors of Mercy Home for Children, a nonprofit organization that provides essential services for children and adults with developmental disabilities in Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island.
She is a daughter of Eileen Goldstein and Jeffrey Goldstein of Ridgewood, N.J. The bride’s father was until 2017 a special representative for collective bargaining at the United Federation of Teachers in Manhattan. Her mother was until 2016 a senior systems analyst at Peoples Education, an educational publishing firm in Saddle Brook, N.J.
The groom, also 32, is a luxury sales manager at Remote Lands, a tour operator in Manhattan that specializes in luxury travel to Asian countries. He also graduated from the University of Vermont.
He is a son of Maureen Nosal and Andrew Nosal of Providence. The groom’s mother is a literacy coach for the Providence Public School System. His father is the owner of the Map Center, a maps store in Providence.
Though the couple lived in the same dorm at the University of Vermont, they did not meet until they were introduced through the dating app Bumble in July 2016. Ms. Goldstein, who has a passion for travel, said she was “intrigued,” by the many places that Mr. Nosal had visited as she perused his dating profile. Included were photos of the pyramids in Egypt, camels in Thailand and tropical beaches in South Korea, where Mr. Nasal lived from 2011 to 2013.
“He seemed liked this really adventurous guy,” she said.
Mr. Nosal said he was “a bit shocked at first” when Ms. Goldstein reached out to him.
“This was a beautiful woman, and a lawyer no less,” he said. “I wasn’t even in her league.”
A week later, they went on the kind of first date that Ms. Goldstein had not been on in her 18 months of online dating: a sunset ferry ride on the East River and a picnic in Brooklyn Bridge Park.
“Every first date was an invite for drinks,” she said. “I was completely impressed with his creativity and thoughtfulness.”
In a month’s time they were dating steadily.
“I loved his goofy, clever sense of humor,” Ms. Goldstein said. “I appreciated his ability to be endlessly enthusiastic about any situation. He was just a lot of fun to be around.”
In May 2018, Mr. Nosal took Ms. Goldstein, who has loved elephants since she was a child, to an elephant camp on the border of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar. Though Ms. Goldstein had a notion that Mr. Nosal would ask her to marry him on that trip — their second visit to Thailand — she did not know that one of the elephants would get in on the act.
Moments later, as Ms. Goldstein posed for a photo with Mr. Nosal and several of the elephants, Mr. Nosal surreptitiously slipped a box over to Yuki, a middle-age female elephant. When one of the elephant guides called out a command, Mr. Nosal pointed to Yuki and told Ms. Goldstein that she had a present for her.
Yuki then turned her trunk, on which a box holding the engagement ring rested, toward Ms. Goldstein, who slowly reached out to take it while Mr. Nosal dropped to one knee and did the rest.
“I rolled the dice by placing a lot of trust in that elephant to not eat the ring,” he said, laughing. “But in the end, I was really happy the way things turned out.”
