Long before she agreed to meet Tyler Bosmeny, Sophie Turnbull, who was finishing up a master’s degree at Harvard, had bought a plane ticket to return to her native Australia.
“I was having dinner one night with a friend and his fiancée, talking about the pitfalls of dating,” said Ms. Turnbull, 32. “Suddenly, out of nowhere, he says ‘Hey Sophie, you have to meet a friend of mine, he’s the most eligible bachelor I know.’”
“Thinking I wasn’t going to meet this Tyler guy anytime soon, I said, ‘Yeah, sure, why not.’”
Ms. Turnbull’s friend, who was living in Boston, also reached out to Mr. Bosmeny. “I get up one morning and there’s a text waiting for me that said, ‘Hey Tyler, the next time you’re in Boston, there’s someone you have to meet,’” said Mr. Bosmeny, 33, a founder and chief executive of Clever, a San Francisco-based software platform used by K-12 schools nationwide.
When Mr. Bosmeny responded that he was planning on attending a work conference in Boston that Monday, just 48 hours later, in January 2019, the table was set.
“What time are you landing on Monday?” the mutual friend asked.
“About 5:30 p.m.,” Mr. Bosmeny said.
“Great,” the friend said, “be prepared for drinks at 6:30.”
Mr. Bosmeny arrived at their meeting place, a Boston pub, before Ms. Turnbull, though the mutual friend and his fiancée were already seated. Their conversation was only minutes old when Ms. Turnbull walked through the front door.
“I looked up and saw this gorgeous Australian walking toward us,” Mr. Bosmeny said. “From the moment she sat down, she was just a joy to talk to.”
Ms. Turnbull, whose return-trip plane ticket was set for June 3, 2019, still had five months to chat
“I was really eager to hear his story because I had previously worked in education and this guy was doing great things in online education, so I was curious about him from a professional standpoint,” said Ms. Turnbull, who was nearing the completion of a master’s degree in public administration at Harvard. (She graduated with first class honors from the Australian National University, from which she also received a law degree.)
“I thought it was a shame that I met this sweet, funny and gregarious family man just several months before I was going home,” Ms. Turnbull said, “but that was still my plan all along, to finish grad school and return straight home to Sydney, to a job that I had put on hold to study and do some work in the U.S. But for sure I was going home to my parents and siblings. My whole life was there.”
The next day, some doubt began to creep into her plans. She and Mr. Bosmeny shared a three-and-a-half-hour lunch in which they became so engrossed in conversation that they forgot to order food. It ended with Mr. Bosmeny racing to the airport and barely making his flight back to San Francisco.
Two weeks later, Mr. Bosmeny and Ms. Turnbull met in New York for what they called a 48-hour date.
Ms. Turnbull told her family all about it when she returned to Sydney, last year. But it wasn’t in June. It was in December, and with her future husband, Mr. Bosmeny, by her side.
They were married Aug. 22 by the Rev. Rita Washington, a nondenominational officiant licensed by the State of Hawaii. She led a ceremony, which was livestreamed to 300 guests over Zoom, at a private residence on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii.
“We’re an international couple,” Mr. Bosmeny said. “We don’t have it all figured out yet, we live in America today, one day we will live in Australia, and that’s all we know.
“But wherever we’re living,” he added, “we’ll be doing it together.”
