Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey and George D. Crowley III are to be married Nov. 11 at the Butterfly Conservatory, Fairchild Garden in Coral Gables, Fla. Ashley Jansen, a friend of the couple who was ordained by the Renewal of the Spirit Institute, is to officiate in a nondenominational ceremony.
The bride, who is 62 and will be taking her husband’s name, is a Miami-based National Geographic explorer and anthropologist. She graduated from Brigham Young University-Hawaii, and received a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology with a specialization in ethnonavigation from the Union Institute in Cincinnati, through which the majority of her four years of course work was completed at the University of Hawaii, Manoa Campus, Honolulu, and the University of Hawaii, Hilo Campus. She also serves on the board of the Tibet Fund.
She is a daughter of the late Lilly Leimomi Wilson Lindsey and the late Henry Keawe Lindsey, who lived in La’ie, Hawaii. The bride’s father was a genealogist in La’ie, where he also served as a professor at Brigham Young, teaching genealogy. Her mother retired as a high school business teacher at Waialua High School.
The groom, 67, founded the Crowley Group, an organization of Washington-based entrepreneurs, among the first of the wireless generation in the 1980s, who created technology start-up businesses.
He graduated from Georgetown, from which he also received a law degree. He served on the Georgetown Board of Regents and the boards of the National Symphony and the Miami City Ballet.
He is a son of the late Rose Marie Crowley and the late George David Crowley, who lived in Chicago. The groom’s father retired as a lawyer in private practice in Chicago.
The couple met through a mutual friend in February 2017, and spoke for a month by telephone before meeting in person.
Dr. Lindsey, who has no children, lived in Los Angeles at the time. Mr. Crowley, who has two grown sons, lived in Miami. She had been widowed for nearly 11 years, and he for 12.
“The thing that impressed me the most about George was that he never talked about what he did for a living,” Dr. Lindsey said. “I was much more interested in a man who didn’t define himself by what he did, or what he had.”
She was in fact, more interested in “how he lived, and what his friends thought about him,” she said.
That is why Dr. Lindsey, an explorer by trade, decided to visit Mr. Crowley in Miami before he visited her.
“He offered to come out to Los Angeles but I thought it would be much more revelatory to see him in his own environment,” she said. “I did just that, and much like George, I found his friends to be all very quietly accomplished. They were sophisticated, well educated and well traveled, they just didn’t talk much about themselves.”
Ms. Lindsey was not alone in her search for the perfect mate.
“I was looking for someone who was spiritual, and through her big heart, I could see that Elizabeth’s spirituality was palpable,” Mr. Crowley said. “She was also an amazingly accomplished woman with great intellect and curiosity.”
They went on a first date to a restaurant in Miami, and on a second to the Butterfly Conservatory in Coral Gables, where their long-distance relationship took flight.
“I loved his modesty, humility and kindness,” Dr. Lindsey said. “There was this deep love and respect for one another.”
To Mr. Crowley, she was his “impossible dream come true.”
“I knew Elizabeth was out there,” he said. “I just kept on looking until the angels brought her into to my life.”
He proposed at sunrise, with the ocean as their witness, on March 1, 2018, “knowing that the ocean was my sanctuary and sunrise, my most inspired moment of the day,” Dr. Lindsey said. “I’ve never met anyone that I have been more suited for.”
