Tiffany Lynn Jow and Wade James Michael were married Sept. 29 at Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Brooklyn. Ishraque H. Nazmi, a Universal Life minister and a friend of the couple, officiated.
The bride, 34, is a design editor at Surface Media, an art and design magazine published in New York. She graduated from the University of Oregon and received a master’s degree in art history from Richmond, the American International University in London.
She is a daughter of Anita L. Jow and Dr. Kimo K. Jow of Auburn, Wash.
The groom, 33, is a field marketing manager in Brooklyn for Stumptown Coffee Roasters, a coffee roaster and retail chain based in Portland, Ore. He is also a guitarist with Little Racer, a rock band that primarily tours New York and the East Coast. He graduated from Michigan Technological University.
He is the son of Laure J. Michael and Richard D. Michael of Green Bay, Wis.
The couple met in Brooklyn in January 2012, three months after Ms. Jow returned from London, where she had spent three years involved in a relationship that ultimately failed.
Ms. Jow was staying in a spare bedroom at her former landlord’s apartment in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, and as she put it, was “determined to approach life as a strong, independent single woman who put herself first instead of the desires or needs of a partner.”
During her second week there, a house guest arrived to visit family and he and Ms. Jow eventually struck up a conversation. When she told him she had broken up with a musician in London, he quickly brought up another musician, his friend Wade Michael, who had just moved to Brooklyn from his native Wisconsin after the breakup of his rock band, American Standard. Mr. Michael, he said, had previously lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and had come to New York a bit dazed and confused, hoping to give his music “one last try.”
When he asked Ms. Jow if she wanted to join him and Mr. Michael for lunch, she politely declined. “I wasn’t interested in being set up,” she said.
She did, however, send Mr. Michael an email to apologize for turning down the invite. “I just wanted to be courteous,” she said.
But when she noticed how “surprisingly proper and charismatic” Mr. Michael’s email responses were, she became intrigued, so she reached out and they arranged to meet for coffee.
“She was very striking with beautiful blonde hair,” Mr. Michael said. “Just the way she talked, and the things she talked about, like the world she was a part of in London, those were things that growing up in the Midwest I was very interested in, but never fully understood.”
They began spending time together and became an item in March 2012, after a heart-to-heart talk at a Brooklyn bar where Ms. Jow discussed the emotional pain of her breakup in London. That conversation was followed by a walk through a nearby park that overlooked the East River, where they shared their first kiss.
They started dating exclusively, but three months later, Ms. Jow, still suffering emotionally from her breakup in London, began feeling uneasy. “I had broken up with a musician, and the last kind of person I wanted to date was a musician,” she said. “It triggered horrible memories, and I found it emotionally, near-impossible to support him or attend his performances.”
“After one particularly difficult evening, we stopped speaking for a week,” she said. “I told Wade it was up to him if he wanted to keep trying; I knew my progress was earnest but slow. I also knew that, more than anything, I wanted him to be happy.”
A week later, Mr. Michael arrived at Ms. Jow’s home with what she felt was his “verdict.”
“I told her how much I missed her and loved her,” Mr. Michael said. “At that time, we were both kind of lost and confused, but we loved each other for who we were, and we had a great deal of trust in one another, so I told her that nothing would make me happier than giving our love one more try.”
