Jessica Jean Reif and Stephen Alan Ehrlich were married Oct. 13 at the Rainbow Room in Manhattan. Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch officiated, with Cantor Daniel Singer taking part.
The bride, who is 62, is a managing director of Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Manhattan. She works in equity research, covering media and entertainment, cable and satellite. She graduated from N.Y.U., from which she also received an M.B.A. She is a member of the Institutional Investor’s Hall of Fame, and is on the executive committee of the UJA Federation.
She is a daughter of the late Natalie Wilder Reif and the late Dr. Irving L. Reif, who lived in Brooklyn. The bride’s father was a general practitioner in private practice in Brooklyn. Her mother was a docent at the Brooklyn Museum.
The groom, 63, is a media and entertainment sales executive at IBM in Manhattan. He graduated from the University of Miami, and received a master’s degree in business and engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.
He is a son of the late Shirley Bush Ehrlich and the late Milton Ehrlich, who lived in Yonkers. The groom’s mother, a member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, was a World War II fighter-pilot instructor at Sweetwater Air Field, in Sweetwater, Tex. She later became an air traffic controller at Idlewild Airport, now known as the John F. Kennedy International Airport. His father was a Manhattan-based liquor distributor.
Ms. Reif and Mr. Ehrlich met in 1998 when each had a child enrolled in nursery school at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.
Through the years, their paths crossed at work-related and charitable events, and Mr. Ehrlich admitted to having “a secret little crush on her.”
In May 2015, during a chance encounter with Ms. Reif at a Manhattan restaurant, Mr. Ehrlich made no secret about his long-held feelings.
At the time, Ms. Reif was in the early stages of a divorce from a 27-year marriage. She was having dinner with two of her sisters when Mr. Ehrlich, who was already divorced and on a date with another woman, walked past their table on his way to the bathroom.
When Mr. Ehrlich engaged Ms. Reif in long conversation, his date became frustrated and departed. When his conversation with Ms. Reif ended, he got in a taxi, alone, and headed home.
A few blocks later, Mr. Ehrlich realized he was heading in the wrong direction. “I said to myself: ‘What am I doing? I don’t even have her phone number,’” he recalled. “I told the driver to turn around and take me back.”
When he returned, Ms. Reif thought that he had just come out of the bathroom, and that his date was still in the restaurant.
“I was unaware of the drama,” she said.
Ms. Reif eventually gave Mr. Ehrlich her phone number, and when he departed, one of her sisters predicted that he was going to ask her out.
“I said, ‘No way, you’re crazy,’ we’ve been friends for so long,” Ms. Reif said. “But he texted me later that night and it was clear that he wanted to go out with me.”
After a month of what Mr. Ehrlich called “absolute persistence,” they had lunch in the Hamptons, where they discovered a shared passion for food, music, wine, travel and above all, family. Ms. Reif has three children, as does Mr. Ehrlich.
“On that first date, there was electricity in the air,” Ms. Reif said.
Mr. Ehrlich likened Ms. Reif’s work ethic and family values to that of his mother, whom he said was “ahead of her time.”
“They both had extremely successful high-profile careers while raising a family,” he said. “And much like my mom, Jessica has a heart of gold, which is why I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.”
