A professional matchmaker was on the phone yet again with David Golden, providing another description of another woman who seemed suitable for a serial dater searching for someone with whom he could one day share true love.
“OK now David, I have another client, Alexandra Brodman, she’s a lawyer from Greenwich,” he recalled the matchmaker saying.
“No, no, no,” Mr. Golden said. “You should know by now that whenever you put the words lawyer and Greenwich together, I’m going to say you have the wrong number.”
But the matchmaker held firm. “Believe me, culturally and on many other levels, you two are very similar,” he said the matchmaker told him. “You’re not going to find her as foreign as you found others from that part of the world.”
(“That part of the world?” Ms. Brodman would later say in astonishment when she heard the retelling. “It’s Connecticut!”)
The conversation between Mr. Golden and the matchmaker, Dominique Salerno, took place in November 2017. Ms. Salerno, a New York-based actor, singer, director and playwright, was then living on the West Coast and working for Tawkify. The company bills itself as “a dating website that uses human matchmakers to select matches”
Ms. Salerno was looking for women whom she felt were compatible for Mr. Golden, who is now 41 and an elected member and family trustee of the Ochs-Sulzberger family trust, which controls The New York Times. In nearly three years he had been set up on an estimated 200 blind dates through Tawkify.
“He was in the matchmaker’s system for quite a while,” said Ms. Brodman, laughing, “and after our first date, I could see why.”
That first date took place later in November 2017 at a bar, which was suggested by the matchmaker, in Manhattan. Mr. Golden, then living in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, entered the bar, looked across the crowded room and locked eyes “with this gorgeous blonde,” he said.
Before walking toward the woman he thought was Ms. Brodman, he double checked her first name, which he had written in the Notes app on his phone. He glanced at the name, and saw he had written Alejandra, not Alexandra. He made a beeline for who he thought might be Ms. Brodman, and he said to himself, “If this girl at the bar is not Alejandra, then Alejandra is watching me right now walk straight over to another woman. She’ll never forgive me.”
But Ms. Brodman was indeed the right woman, and just as the matchmaker had predicted, they hit it off and were soon dating.
Mr. Golden had found a connection with Ms. Brodman, a 35-year-old Brooklyn law clerk by way of Greenwich, Conn.
They were engaged on June 7, 2019 on the rooftop of their building in Cobble Hill.
They were married July 18 at the home of her father, Richard Brodman, in Mount Desert, Maine. (The couple originally planned to marry there on July 11, but the coronavirus forced them to change the date and shrink their guest list to 20 from 200.)
The groom’s father, Stephen Golden, who became a Universal Life minister for the event, led the ceremony. The bride, who took the groom’s name, clerks for Judge Margo K. Brodie of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, with chambers in Brooklyn. She graduated from Emory University and received a law degree from Northwestern.
The groom is a musician and a founder and the managing partner of Saing, a company that caters to the specific needs of the film and real estate industries in Atlanta and New York, regarding matters such as the temporary arrangement of lodging and conference space. He graduated from Williams College and was a Fulbright fellow in South Korea in 2001.
“Looking back, I think it’s hilarious that David didn’t want to date me,” the bride said, laughing again. “After all of those dates, he finally got it right. And so did the matchmaker.”
