In June 2021, Dr. Daniel Solomon Vener just had to know if Andrea Elizabeth Allen could see herself moving to New Zealand with him in about a year.
It was only their third date.
Dr. Vener, 31, was then a second-year resident at Ben Taub Hospital, affiliated with Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he received a medical degree. He had dreamed of finishing the last six months of his residency in New Zealand.
“Prematurely, yes, of course,” replied Dr. Allen, also 31, who was always up for an adventure and figured she could work on her dissertation remotely.
Last December, she received a doctorate in curriculum and instruction focusing on art education from the University of Houston, where she also received a master’s in the subject and a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism.
Dr. Vener was relieved by her answer because he wanted to continue dating her. He is now a psychiatry fellow in psycho-oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center; he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin.
A month earlier, on May 20, 2021, after the two matched on the dating app Hinge, Dr. Allen had been determined to meet him before she left on a 10-day trip to visit a friend in Colombia. So they met a couple of days later, in a downpour, at Grand Prize, a dive bar in Houston.
