A disagreement about the politics of confrontation was at the heart of the first conversation that Kelly Witwicki Faddegon and Jacy Reese Anthis had when they met, at the beginning of summer in 2014.
She was living in a house in Oakland, Calif., as an employee of a small animal-rights organization. He was in the Bay Area for a summer internship researching the effectiveness of activism strategies, before his final year of college at the University of Texas. He had become acquainted with members of the animal-rights group through his internship and met Ms. Witwicki Faddegon at a dinner party.
“I was quite critical of the approach they took, and she was defending it, so our first encounter was a debate,” he said, referring to the group members’ tactics. “But I saw her as someone who had a lot of alignment with myself, who was more open-minded than some of the other people.”
Both recognized that the spark between them was about more than politics.
“We just hit it off really quickly,” said Ms. Witwicki Faddegon, 28. “I really loved what he brought out in me. He made me more thoughtful about things I cared about. He challenged me and I challenged him back as well.”
The couple fell in love quickly, and he soon all but moved into the house she shared with her colleagues. By the time he returned to Austin, Texas, that fall, the two had agreed to a long-distance relationship.
“We clicked so well that we decided to make it work,” he said.
After he graduated, he returned to the Bay Area, taking along his dog, Apollo. The couple adopted two chickens that had been residents at an egg farm, and, more recently, they also adopted a dog from Korea.
Mr. Anthis, 27, whose pen name is Jacy Reese, is now a research fellow at the Sentience Institute. Ms. Witwicki Faddegon, who intends to take Anthis as her surname, was until December the group’s executive director, and is now a user-experience engineer for software development at InRhythm, a technology consulting company in New York.
“Kelly originally was not excited about marriage,” Mr. Anthis said. “She thought a long-term romantic relationship didn’t need any kind of label, whereas I thought it would be nice to have the ring.”
Her feelings, she said, “came out of activist culture, not caring about norms or whatever. Realizing that it might matter to him, I became more interested in it as a solidification of our partnership. I felt how important it was to him, and so it became important to me.”
In the acknowledgments section of his book, “The End of Animal Farming,” (Beacon Press, 2018) he wrote, “There’s no better time and place than right here and right now to ask this question: Kelly, will you marry me?”
(He also proposed in a rowboat on the lake in Central Park, as she read the acknowledgments aloud.)
The couple had originally planned to marry in Mexico, but with the uncertainty that the coronavirus pandemic, they opted instead for a marriage closer to where they now live. Then the Manhattan Marriage Bureau closed.
So on May 2, the couple drove down to the Delaware Water Gap, and were married in a self-uniting ceremony on the Pennsylvania side of the river, with a marriage license obtained in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County. They brought two friends to witness. In June, they intend to have a ceremony in California.
“We have that total openness, complete trust. If I fall — however I fall — he is going to be there,” she said. “He’s inspiring me to be my best self. He makes me the person I want to be.”
