THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2020 ST 13Katie Adams and Emily Fletcher, both
neuroscience majors at Dartmouth
College, were in the last term of their
final year, in 2013, before they met.
Ms. Adams noticed Ms. Fletcher (left), both
now 29, because the latter was perpetually late to
a class they had together, and so had to sit in the
back with the teaching assistants.
“I really liked her hair,” Ms. Adams said. “Really
nice curly hair, good ringlets.”
Ms. Adams was a four-year varsity athlete and
was a catcher on the school’s softball team. Ms.
Fletcher worked on the school newspaper and
served as editor in chief in 2012. Their friendship
groups did not intersect.
One of Ms. Fletcher’s columns, not quite pub-
lished, figured prominently in their first romantic
encounter.
A few weeks before they were to graduate, Ms.
Fletcher and a group of friends attended a formal
in White River Junction, Vt., that was put on by
Ms. Adams’s sorority. While there, she got a call
saying that something she had written for the
college newspaper wasn’t going to run.
“It was probably some navel-gazing thing about
my time in college,” Ms. Fletcher said. “I remem-
ber knowing at the time it was not very good, but
still being upset.”
Ms. Adams, who said she had recently had a
romantic dream about her neuroscience class-
mate, offered some consolation. The two women
left the party for a while to allow Ms. Fletcher
time to gather herself.
“We walked along the train tracks and kind of
got to know each other,” Ms. Fletcher said.
The two shared their first kiss that night, and
then spent at least some portion of all the follow-
ing days together.
“She’s very generous and kind, a very, very
sweet and loving person,” Ms. Fletcher said. “She
also has a playful streak, so is always looking to
make a game of things and liven things up.”
Ms. Adams said it was quickly clear to her that
this wasn’t just a last-chance college romance. “It
felt so different from anything I had ever felt
before,” she said.
After graduation, both returned home to Wash-
ington State, where their families lived about 20
miles apart in the Seattle metropolitan area. Ms.
Fletcher is now a campaign manager for the ma-
jority leader of Washington’s House of Represent-
atives and is to become a consultant in the Seattle
office of the Boston Consulting Group in January.
Ms. Adams is a data scientist for the research
institute of MedStar Health, a health care system
based in Columbia, Md.
Ms. Fletcher said that getting to know Ms.
Adams in the context of her family, which includes
six nephews, was inspiring. “Seeing how she was
with the people who are important to her made
me want to be one of those important people,” she
said.
In the years that followed, they returned to
Hanover, N.H., where Dartmouth is. They then
moved to Washington, D.C., and to Ann Arbor,
Mich., where Ms. Fletcher obtained a master’s
degree in public policy and an M.B.A. in May from
the University of Michigan. Ms. Adams is now
studying for a master’s degree in computer sci-
ence through an online program at the Georgia
Institute of Technology.
They have driven across the country together
four times and now are back in Washington State.
On June 20, the couple were married at the
vacation home in Quilcene, Wash., of Ms. Adams’s
family, with 19 guests attending. (Both will use
Adams as a middle name and Fletcher as their
surname.) Ryan S. Adams, one of Ms. Adams’s
brothers, presided at the couple’s marriage, hav-
ing become a Universal Life minister for the occa-
sion. They had planned a big wedding at an events
space on Whidbey Island, outside Seattle, but
postponed that until 2021 because of the coro-
navirus pandemic.
“We’ll begin a new chapter, starting a family,
shortly thereafter,” Ms. Adams said. “It just felt
like the right time to take that next step.”
NINA REYESEmily Fletcher,
Katie Adams
................................................................................................................................................................................................................
More Than a Last-Chance College Romance
Evelyn Rodriguez and Feliberto Gon-
zalo, both 27, were high school sweet-
hearts who started dating their senior
year at Union City High School in New
Jersey, and in 2010 went to their prom together.
Mr. Gonzalo, who wore a tuxedo to the prom,
gave her a wrist corsage spray painted with gold
glitter to match her white gown with gold flowers,
and picked her up in his father’s yellow Hummer.
“It was probably the only yellow Hummer in
New Jersey,” Ms. Rodriguez said with a laugh.
“My mother would make fun of it and say it was a
school bus picking me up.”
Ms. Rodriguez, now an associate at Werner
Suarez, a law firm in Hackensack, N.J., was the
first in her family to go to college. She graduated
cum laude from Rutgers, and received a law de-
gree from Seton Hall.
“She’s beautiful, and a great person who makes
me better,” said Mr. Gonzalo, a New Jersey State
trooper based in Hope Station, N.J. He graduated
from New Jersey City University.
Ms. Rodriguez was born in Cuba, and came to
the United States when she was 7; Mr. Gonzalo’s
father is Cuban, and his mother is Ecuadorean.
“My whole family loves him,” said Ms. Rodri-
guez, “and his whole family loves me.”
They were just 17, when Mr. Gonzalo picked her
up for their first date on Dec. 30, 2009.
“He was so funny,” she said. “He was super
skinny. Skinnier than me. He has hazel eyes and
curly hair. He was always picking on me and
making jokes.”
During college they saw each other on week-
ends, usually at family gatherings.
“I feel like there was an event every week,” she
said, and during the week and Saturdays, he
worked at his family’s truck repair business.
“He works hard and plays hard,’’ she said. “He
likes to be around family all the time.”
Mr. Gonzalo said she was nervous about going
to law school. But he recalled telling her, “ ‘It’s not
going to be easy, but you got to do it.’ She pushed
me through college. I gave her support through
law school. She passed the bar in one shot.”
He proposed in May 2018 at her law schoolgraduation party, in front of 80 guests, after she
was sworn into the New Jersey bar.
“My boss swore me in at the party,’ ” she said.
“My parents were holding the Bible,’’ and then she
recalled Mr. Gonzalo grabbed her hand, and said,
“ ‘I’m very proud of you. You’re going to be an
awesome attorney, but I know you’re going to be
an even better wife,’ ” and then he got down on one
knee.
By the end of the year they moved into their
house in Little Falls, N.J., with their two Maltipoo
dogs, Mason and Ava.
“He’s definitely not skinnier than me anymore,’’
she said, and now he drives his own little red
Corvette. (His father still has the Hummer). “He
works hard for the future, spending as much time
with me as he can so that we have everything we
envisioned growing up. We’re living the American
dream.”
They originally planned to marry on May 24 at
the Ss. Joseph and Michael Church in Union City,
with 150 guests, and now plan to renew their vows
there next April. They decided to get legally mar-
ried June 27 in their backyard in Little Falls. The
groom’s sister Jessica Kovach, affiliated with the
American Marriage Ministries, officiated at a
small ceremony with their immediate family.
ROSALIE R. RADOMSKYEvelyn Rodriguez,
Feliberto Gonzalo
................................................................................................................................................................................................................
For a New Lawyer, an Immediate Proposal to Consider
LIVE PICTURE STUDIOSA few days before they were supposed
to have their first date, in February
2018, a sharp-eyed friend of Andrea
Raines’s saw a man walking by the
San Francisco bar that the women were waiting to
enter. The man looked exactly like the picture Ms.
Raines had just shared of her soon-to-be date from
his profile on the League dating app.
“I’m a fairly generic-looking man with a beard
— there’s nothing distinct about me,” Michael
Gehlken said afterward. “I have no clue how
Andrea’s friend spotted me walking down that
street. But I certainly am grateful.”
Ms. Raines, who was decked out in ‘80s attire,
including a tutu, leg warmers and a scrunchie, for
a theme party, was mortified when she also recog-
nized him. “My initial reaction was to duck and
run,” she said.
And so she did. She blasted past the bouncer
into the bar without showing her identification,
and when he came in after her and she explained,
he took pity on her.
Her friends, however, persuaded her that this
chance almost-encounter with Mr. Gehlken was a
not-to-be-missed opportunity, so she sent him a
text asking if he had just walked past Maggie
McGarry’s, an Irish pub. By that point, he was
already in a shared Uber and heading back to
Oakland, Calif., where he lived.
He was happy to seize the moment. He asked
the driver to drop him off and then called another
car. “It was kind of exciting,” he said. “You’re fully
intending on meeting someone, so it was some-
thing different. First dates can be very monoto-
nous, so to meet someone spur of the moment
seemed like a good way to do it.”
Ms. Raines and Mr. Gehlken ended up closing
the place down that evening, and, after sharing a
hug, she asked if he still wanted to get together for
the first date as they’d originally planned.
“And I said absolutely,” said Mr. Gehlken, 32, a
staff writer for The Dallas Morning News, cover-
ing the Dallas Cowboys.
When they met two days later, Mr. Gehlken
quickly found himself entranced by Ms. Raines,
also 32 and now an executive communications
leader in Plano, Texas, for the American divisionof Samsung Electronics. “I was just hanging on
every word,” he said. “I was really captivated by
her presence and energy.”
Afterward, she had a birthday party to go to,
and he walked her there. She impulsively kissed
him. “And he said, ‘I don’t normally kiss on the
first date,’ ” she said. “I was so embarrassed.” Mr.
Gehlken said that what he actually said had in-
cluded a loophole.
“I said, ‘I usually don’t kiss on the first date, but
technically this is a first-date-and-a-half,’ ” he said.
“It was a joke that didn’t quite sync up there.”
On their second and a half date, they explored
Oakland. For the third, she arrived at his apart-
ment with bags and bags and bags of supplies: all
the fixings for pizza — dough, sauce, cheese and
every imaginable topping — as well as a DVD
player, her five favorite movies, and an entire
concession stand’s worth of movie candy.
They were soon in love.
“We would have as much fun going out to a nice
restaurant or hearing live music as staying in and
playing this card game that his grandparents used
to play,” she said. “I could see us into the future.”
On June 20, the couple were married in Wash-
ington, in the backyard of the bride’s mother’s
house. They self united, as allowed by District of
Columbia statute, with 13 people in attendance
and as many as 175 watching on a livestream.
“It’s a very challenging time, with the pandemic
and in terms of what’s going on culturally, soci-
etally, with race relations,” Ms. Raines said. “But I
didn’t want to wait to start our life together, and I
wanted to bring some joy back into our lives and
our families’ lives.”
NINA REYESAndrea Raines,
Michael Gehlken................................................................................................................................................................................................................It Was Love at First-and-a-Half Sight
TONY POWELLIt took two first dates for Nuala O’Con-
nor and Peter Bass to fall in love.
In 2013, Mr. Bass, 56, was chatting
with a college friend from Princeton at
an event in Washington.
“I was newly divorced and I had been doing the
whole online thing and was finding it a little tire-
some and challenging,” he said. “I think she was
the one who said, ‘Would you be interested in
meeting someone who shares a lot of your back-
ground?’ ”
The college friend had in mind Nuala O’Connor,
51, who is now a senior vice president and top
data-privacy lawyer for Walmart. The two women
had had a conversation a few weeks earlier, in
which Ms. O’Connor, who had also divorced re-
cently, asked if she knew of anybody who might be
right for her.
“I have never been very intentional about going
out and meeting people,” Ms. O’Connor said.
Mr. Bass, now the chief executive of Quberu, an
online platform for businesses to manage interna-
tional trade deals, agreed to be set up, and a few
weeks later, he and Ms. O’Connor went on their
first first date.
The two had dinner alone, and then met another
couple for an evening of Shakespeare. At the end
of the date, he kissed her on her cheek as she
stood in front of her minivan, which was covered
with stickers from her three children’s schools.
“I thought he seemed very sweet and very, very
smart, and a little guarded,” she said.
The two did have much in common. They both
had three children and had spent years in federal
government service. She has a law degree from
Georgetown as well as a master’s degree in educa-
tion from Harvard; he has a law degree from Yale.
She nicknamed him “Culture Man,” as he
seemed to have an endless supply of tickets to
theater, opera, symphony. Finally, she told him, “I
would be happy with pizza and a movie. That
would be fine. That would be more my speed.”
Three or four months later, the “hiatus,” as he
calls it, began.“I got busy, she got busy,” he said. “It was prob-
ably moving a little too quickly for me. I was very
attracted to her but the divorce was still fresh, and
I wasn’t really ready to go in with both feet.”
Ms. O’Connor put it a little differently. “He
ghosted me,” she said.
Months went by. And then, she started thinking
about him again.
“I can confidently say he is the most well-man-
nered person I have ever dated,” she said. “Old-
school manners: polite, a gentleman of the first
order. And he’s got all those tickets.”
So she emailed him.
“I leapt at it,” he said. “By that point, I knew I
had made a mistake the first time, and I was
beyond grateful — beyond thankful — that she
reached out to me.”
For their second first date, in September 2014,
they again went to Shakespeare.
“I kind of knew after that second first date that
she was special and this was the one,” he said.
“She’s is unbelievably kind and at the same time
honest and strong and just whip smart. Plus, she’s
gorgeous.”
Ms. O’Connor described him as the “smartest
and simply most humble human being I know,
which I think is an intoxicating combination,
particularly here in Washington.”
Two years ago, the couple was engaged and
then bought a house together in Chevy Chase, Md.
But with six children between them and their own
commitments, they just couldn’t find a date to
marry. Then Covid-19 came. “It suddenly occurred
to us in the middle of this pandemic that every-
one’s here,” Mr. Bass said.
So on June 21, in the backyard of their house,
the couple married. Rabbi Sarah Tasman officiat-
ed via Zoom, with as many as 500 others, from all
across the globe, also on the video link.
“We are choosing love and connection and
companionship,” Ms. O’Connor said. “And a little
bit of joy in a very difficult time.”
NINA REYESNuala O’Connor,
Peter Bass................................................................................................................................................................................................................Absence Made the Heart Go Ponder
ZOEICA IMAGESWEDDINGS
Vows