When Bennett Eastham needed a mental-health break last June from working long hours at a Virginia law firm, he made plans to travel to Copenhagen to see Andrew Bird, an American singer, perform there.
Before departing, Mr. Eastham, 28, also contacted Ebba Palmstierna, 27, “an old friend from Sweden,” as he described her, who in 2008 lived for a short time as a foreign exchange student on his family’s cattle farm in Washington, Va.
“We had always been friends, but still, I got butterflies in my stomach when he called to invite me to the concert,” said Ms. Palmstierna, who lived in Malmö, Sweden, about a half-hour train ride from Copenhagen.
They attended the concert together, and Mr. Eastham spent a few more days hanging around Ms. Palmstierna and her friends, one of whom asked Mr. Eastham what it was like to live in the same home as a foreign exchange student.
When Mr. Eastham replied, “If you’re asking me what it was like to live with a beautiful Swedish woman back in high school, I’d say it was pretty great.”
When those words were relayed to her, verbatim, Ms. Palmstierna said, “it was like my eyes had been closed all these years, and for the first time I was able to see Bennett, with confidence and courage, in a romantic way.”
That night, Mr. Eastham and Ms. Palmstierna went to a club in Malmö, “where we just talked about things for a while,” he said, “until we started kissing — and that’s where the whole thing began.”
Ms. Palmstierna recalled the moment with passion in her voice: “My heart was pounding like a teenage girl,” she said. “Here I was, kissing my friend Bennett. It was surreal.”
Mr. Eastham, who graduated from Virginia Tech and received a law degree from Washington & Lee University, said that his family was ecstatic to learn that he and Ms. Palmstierna, an artist who works with oil paints and ceramics, had turned a romantic corner.
“Ebba came to visit us a few months later,” Mr. Eastham said. “As soon as she saw my mom, they just hugged each other and started to cry.”
In January 2020, Ms. Palmstierna visited the Eastham family once more, their relationship considerably more serious this time around. She was not expected to return to Sweden until April 2020, and Mr. Eastham had already purchased airline tickets for himself to visit her this summer.
By mid-March, the talk of marriage was in the air, but so was the coronavirus. “We didn’t think things would get as bad as they got,” Mr. Eastham said, “but then we closed our borders, as did Denmark, and Ebba’s plane ticket was canceled.
“We didn’t know when she would try and make it home, or if she did, when she would be able to get back here.”
They sat down and discussed their options, and came to the realization that they would be better off eloping, and with Mr. Eastham’s parents in tow, did just that on April 18 at Ciao Bella Celebrations, a private wedding chapel in Warrenton, Va. Dan McLinden, a marriage celebrant authorized by Virginia, performed the ceremony.
“Two weeks after we were married, we got engaged, the whole thing has been crazy,” Mr. Eastham said, laughing. “With this virus still in the air, Ebba and I thrilled to be married, and more important, to be together in crazy times like these.”
