Demetrice Deshay Elmore and Joseph Joy LeMieux are to be married Oct. 6. Grady D. King, a minister of the Church of Christ, is to officiate at the San Sophia Overlook, an events space at the Telluride Ski and Golf Resort in Telluride, Colo.
The bride, 33, is known as Dee and will take her husband’s name. She is a corporate human resources lead, in Broomfield, Colo., for the North American operations of Danone, a French food-products company. She was in the United States Army Reserves from 2003-14, attaining the rank of sergeant and serving as a medical logistics specialist on a Navy base in Millington, Tenn. She also served a year in Doha, Qatar, distributing medical supplies to military units station in the region. She graduated from the University of Central Arkansas.
The bride was raised by her aunt, Lanice Elmore of Gilmore, Ark. She is also the daughter of Ericka V. Elmore-Hopkins of Turrell, Ark.
The groom, 34, is a surgical technologist at National Jewish Health, a hospital in Denver. He is also a real estate agent at Your Castle Real Estate in Denver. He graduated from Colorado State University.
He is the son of Donna M. LeMieux of Colorado Springs and the late David H. Stark, who lived in Evergreen, Colo.
The couple met through the dating app Tinder in 2018, and progressed from chatting on the app to texting, and then he asked her out for coffee. But she had a different idea.
“She said, ‘Let’s have an adventure together,’” he said. “I came up with the idea to hike a 14,000-foot mountain, and she was on board.”
He said he would drive but she said she would feel more comfortable on the two-hour drive to the hike in her own car — considering that the two hadn’t even met at that point — and so they met up at 6 a.m. and headed for Quandary Peak.
Ms. Elmore was new to Colorado, having moved from Dallas about a month before the couple’s first date, and she struggled with acclimating to the altitude. Mr. LeMieux had qualms of his own about the climb, but Ms. Elmore saw it differently.
“He was so comforting and reassuring, making sure I was 100 percent the whole time,” she said. “I got to see how he did under pressure. We were in a partnership so early on because we had to depend on each other.”
He also found something unexpected in the date. “We bonded more than I’ve ever bonded with anyone on that hike,” he said. “She had this glow and this energy that I had never experienced before.”
Dinner followed the hike, and then they headed home. This time, he was at the wheel of her car. “She fell asleep while I drove, and it was meaningful to me that she trusted me enough to do that,” he said.
A second date quickly followed, and then the issue of religion came up. He said he was an atheist, and she said her Christian faith was important to her. Both had tried dating across the divide of belief previously and they agreed it probably just wouldn’t work.
So they broke up. And then had their first kiss. And then parted ways.
“I agreed we probably should not continue, and a day later I had changed my mind and disagreed,” Mr. LeMieux said. “I had had such an amazing time with her that I thought we should try it.”
So he wrote her a letter, enumerating the reasons he thought they should give their relationship a chance. “What changed my mind is just rethinking it, thinking about how much I liked everything about her,” he said.
Ms. Elmore said she had heard something in all that he said that put her concerns about their differing beliefs to rest. “He’s very open-minded,” she said. “I had dated people that were not religious that didn’t so much appreciate that about me — mocked it or didn’t understand it.”
While neither persuaded the other on the matter of belief, Mr. LeMieux now goes to church with Ms. Elmore. “Atheism is not a core, strong thing for me, so attending church and praying is something that I do with her and I respect,” he said. “Her faith is important to her, and my atheism is not important to me.”
