When Meghan Louttit first contacted Joseph Iervolino on the dating app OkCupid in November 2015, he was sitting in a plane on a tarmac at Newark airport, bound for Thailand.
Ms. Louttit was impressed. “I thought to myself, ‘Wow, here’s someone with a nice smile who likes to travel and seems very adventurous,’” she said.
Besides his “great smile,” Ms. Louttit said that Mr. Iervolino also had a “great way with words — he really knew how to express himself.”
“Almost everything he had in his profile could easily have been in my profile,” added Ms. Louttit, 35, a deputy editor on the Metro Desk of The New York Times who graduated from Ohio University. “That’s how much we had in common.”
Ms. Louttit, who then lived in Brooklyn, and Mr. Iervolino, who resided in Rutherford, N.J., spoke or emailed every day during his two-week vacation to Thailand, and a few days after landing back in Newark, their relationship took off.
“I was immediately attracted to Meghan’s intellect,” said Mr. Iervolino, 34, a product director at OkCupid in New York who graduated from Kean University.
“She was beautiful, kind, compassionate and patient,” he said. “And it was really great to find someone who was always game for an adventure. I admired her tenacity.”
By January 2016, their relationship had turned a serious corner, and six months later, Mr. Iervolino and Ms. Louttit moved into an apartment in Jersey City, N.J. The following year they bought a home in Union City.
The couple have shared many adventures together, from riding motorbikes through northern Thailand and smoking cigars in Havana to tasting cocktails around Japan. “Meghan is my best friend,” Mr. Iervolino said. “I never met a woman who matched me beat for beat like she does.”
He pointed to a conversation that took place between them in October 2019, at a friend’s wedding in Pittsburgh, as the moment they got engaged.
It was a moment that did not include the offering of a ring on bended knee. “We were sitting there having a drink together and I said to Meghan, ‘When do you think we should do this?’ And she responded, ‘I don’t know, soon?’”
“We had known for a while that we were going to get married,” Ms. Louttit said. “It was just a matter of figuring out when and where it was going to be, and then we would call people. We didn’t need a big romantic gesture to say we were going to get married. We just needed an agreement.”
They initially agreed to get married in September 2020, but postponed those plans because of the coronavirus. The couple were legally married Sept. 10 at Union City Hall in Union City, N.J., with the city’s mayor, Brian Stack, officiating.
On Sept. 18, the couple took part in a celebration ceremony at the New Middletown, Ohio, home of the bride’s parents, Cheri Louttit and Ken Louttit. Also in attendance were the groom’s parents, Rosa Iervolino and Gerard Iervolino of Toms River, N.J.
“I knew very early on that Meghan was the perfect partner for me,” the groom said. “I knew I wanted to live the rest of my life with her.”
