Tisza Ann Szeremy Bell and Brian Michael Guyer will never know with certainty what quirk of fate caused the dating app Tinder to match them in the spring of 2014.
She lived at the time in Bozeman, Mont., while he was 440 miles away, in Park City, Utah. When they connected virtually, she was somewhat closer — in Logan, Utah, wearing hip-waders as she collected wastewater samples for her doctoral research. She graduated from Colgate University, received a master’s degree in environmental studies from the University of Colorado, and, eventually, a doctoral degree in microbiology from Montana State University.
But even in Logan, she was still more than 100 miles from Park City.
“How exactly we got one another, we’re still not sure,” she said.
She was struck by the authenticity his profile projected, so she swiped right anyway. So did he.
“I was immediately intrigued by her,” said Mr. Guyer, who graduated from what is now Baldwin Wallace University, in Berea, Ohio.
They texted for a week or two and then switched to phone calls.
Dr. Bell, studying for doctoral exams, wondered if she was wasting her time. She now works remotely from Livingston, Mont., as a product manager for sequencing research and development at the Pandemic Response Lab, a unit of Opentrons Labworks, a Brooklyn biotechnology company.
“I was a little embarrassed for myself,” Dr. Bell, 38, said. “If I didn’t do well on this exam, how much of that could I attribute to talking to someone I’d never met, on the phone?”
“There was a period she kept saying, ‘I don’t think you’re real,’” Mr. Guyer, 43, said. “I tried to tell her she wasn’t being catfished.”
On the Sunday before Memorial Day, about a month after they’d met, Mr. Guyer asked if she’d like to meet him the next day in Driggs, Idaho, which was just about halfway between their respective towns.
The three-hour-and-a-half hour drive gave each plenty of time to develop predate jitters.
“I got up there early and had a beer to calm my nerves,” he said. “And in strolled Tisza Bell. We gave each other a big hug, and it was off to the races.”
They had their bike ride, then drinks and dinner, and lingering conversation.
“I was getting ready to get in my car to leave, and we had our first kiss,” Dr. Bell, said. “And I was like, ‘Wow. Shoot. Snap out of it. Gotta get home.’”
But she didn’t make it five miles outside of Driggs before he called to tell her he hadn’t left and ask if she might consider returning for the night. She turned right around.
“Morning arrives, and even then it was hard to separate,” she said. “He was like, ‘I think we’re in trouble.’”
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
“I’d never had anyone be willing to say, ‘I really like you, and I’m really excited to see where this goes,’” she said. “No games.”
Until January 2016, when he took at job in Bozeman at the Human Resource Development Council, which works to develop community and support people who are struggling, they drove between Utah and Montana. He is now the organization’s housing director.
In 2017, the couple returned to long-distance — this time more than 16 hours’ drive — when she accepted a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Both were committed to keeping their relationship a priority.
“With Tisza, I kept finding myself very willing to do the work of making the relationship endure,” said Mr. Guyer, whose previous marriage ended in divorce. “A failed marriage will definitely give you the hindsight of understanding that chemistry only takes you so far.”
In the fall of 2019, Dr. Bell returned once again to Montana — though to Missoula, which was a three-hour drive from Bozeman — for another fellowship. The couple thereafter saw each other most weekends.
One of those, in September 2020, went spectacularly badly. They’d met outside Butte, Mont., where they encountered an unexpected snowstorm, their truck suffered a flat that they didn’t have the tools to manage and they didn’t have cell service to call for reinforcements. They laughed through it all, and by Sunday, when the sun finally broke through, Mr. Guyer proposed.
“He said, ‘If I had a ring, I’d ask you to marry me right now,’ and I said, ‘I’m not going to make you ask this question again,’” she said.
On Sept. 17, at the Lewis & Clark Caverns State Park in Whitehall, Mont., the two were married before about 60 guests. Maria Blevins, a friend who became a Universal Life minister so that she might preside at the event, officiated.
Tinder may have provided a surprising match to start the process, but Dr. Bell offered, in her vows, a poetic scientific explanation for the relationship’s durability.
“After eight years together, I no longer possess a cell in my body that existed before you,” she said. “So, quite literally, my life doesn’t know an existence without yours.”
