THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020 ST 13Vows
WEDDINGSMia Aplin Rollins and Samuel Sebas-
tian Pihan, both 25, set a record on
Oct. 3 as the youngest couple ever to
get married at RiverWoods Exeter, a
retirement community in Exeter, N.H. Fourteen
years earlier, her maternal grandfather, Dick
Aplin, now 91, had the first wedding there in
October 2006, when he was 77.
“My mom had the idea,” said Ms. Rollins, who
grew up in Nashville. She had planned a big
Southern wedding in May with about 200 guests,
at her family’s summer home in Monteagle,
Tenn., before it was canceled because of the
coronavirus.
“Seb was immediately so thrilled and excited
about the idea and my grandfather ran with it,”
she said. “My grandfather has barely seen any-
one in the past months.”
Ms. Rollins, a video and audio installation
sculptor, is pursuing an M.F.A. in sculpture at
Rhode Island School of Design. In 2019, her work
was part of “Seven Voyages,” a two-person show
at Studio 66 Gallery in Nashville. Until 2019, she
was also an art teacher for prekindergarten to
fourth grade at the Episcopal School of Nash-
ville.
Mr. Pihan, who goes by Seb, is a Coffin Family
Law fellow in the family law victims rights unit
at Pine Tree Legal Assistance, a legal aid group
in Portland, Me. He received a law degree in
May from N.Y.U.
The couple met in 2013, the first day of fresh-
man orientation at Brown, from which each
graduated magna cum laude. Mr. Pihan and his
roommate stood by in the Champlin Hall dorm
kitchen as Ms. Rollins baked about six dozen Toll
House chocolate chip cookies, to welcome new
arrivals.
Two days later when Mr. Pihan saw her in her
dorm hallway, he invited her to breakfast at the
Blue Room cafe on campus, where Ms. Rollin’s
said they became “instant, dear friends.”
They talked about the graphic novel “Watch-
men,” and Mr. Pihan impressed her with a quote
from it: “All we ever see of the stars are their old
photographs.”
On Jan. 28, Ms. Rollins’s birthday, he and two
of her friends organized a surprised celebration
in their dorm kitchen. Later she and Mr. Pihan
spent the evening at Jackson Pollock Night at a
literary fraternity they eventually joined, where
students splattered paint on giant sheets of
paper on walls. At another party there in March
Ms. Rollins and Mr. Pihan, had their first kiss, as
they danced.
In August 2014, Mr. Pihan met her grandfather
and his wife, Peggy Hoyt, Ms. Rollin’s late step-
grandmother, at dinner in Wellesley, Mass.
“I looked at my grandfather and Peggy and I
knew I wanted that with someone, and knew I
could love Seb like that,” Ms. Rollins said. So they
made their relationship work long distance after
college, and currently while they live three hours
apart. “We’re continually falling in love with each
other,” she said.
Mr. Pihan proposed Thanksgiving weekend
2018, also the weekend of his birthday, while they
were visiting her family in Nashville, and his
parents flew in from Weston, Mass.
“She’s been a reserve of strength for me,” he
said. “I love her to tears.”
The Rev. David Grishaw-Jones, a United
Church of Christ minister, led a nondenomina-
tional ceremony Oct. 3, before immediate family
on the lawn of her grandfather’s retirement
community in Exeter.
“The only thing that could have made it more
perfect was if my grandparents Mary and David
Rollins from Nashville could make it,” she said.
“They’re hoping for grandbabies.”
ROSALIE R. RADOMSKYMELISSA KORENMia Rollins,
Seb Pihan
................................................................................................................................................................................................................
The Liveliest Couple at the Retirement Home
Lyndsey Cecilia McKenna and Nicho-
las Justin Bunker were supposed to
run the Chicago marathon on Oct. 11,
but after it was canceled they de-
cided to make the date special another way —
with a small wedding at St. Mary Our Lady of
Grace Catholic Church in St. Petersburg, Fla.
“At every point the goal posts were shifting,”
Ms. McKenna said. With the onset of the corona-
virus in March, race after race was being can-
celed, along with their original wedding date,
March 28, at the church, with about 200 guests.
“Planning for a wedding, frankly, was emotion-
ally more intensive than training for a mara-
thon,” said Ms. McKenna, who completed the
Chicago marathon in 2017 and last year ran the
New York marathon with Mr. Bunker, as well as
several shorter races with him in between. Mr.
Bunker took up running in late summer of 2017
while she was training for the Chicago marathon.
“He went from 0 to 100 in running,” said Ms.
McKenna, 29, an assistant editor and the audi-
ence strategist at NPR Music in Washington. She
graduated with honors from the University of
Chicago and received a master’s degree in jour-
nalism from Northwestern.
Mr. Bunker, 32, is based in Washington as the
economic research director for North America at
the hiring lab at Indeed, the job search company.
He graduated from Georgetown.
When they first met in September 2016 at a
birthday celebration for a mutual friend in Wash-
ington, she mentioned she ran 18 miles through
Rock Creek Park and along the National Mall
that morning.
“I was impressed by her running, but I could-
n’t understand the appeal,” said Mr. Bunker, who
found himself on more equal footing when they
got on the subject of pop culture websites and
podcasts.
The next day he got her number via their
mutual friend, and later that week they went to
see the movie “Don’t Think Twice,” stopping for
beers before and after.
“Clearly neither of us wanted to end the night,”
he said.
They had what she described as “a city good-
night kiss,” a kiss on the street before each
headed in the opposite direction. When they met
again, for brunch that Sunday, she apologized forinitiating a kiss, but he laughed and responded
with another.
“We really, really felt an affinity,” Ms. McKenna
said.
They soon rewatched old TV shows together
like “Parks and Recreation,” and he moved in
with her in May 2017. “It was our comfort food,”
she said. “It’s one of those shows on in the back-
ground in our relationship.”
In 2019 he proposed in their apartment as they
streamed the “Smallest Park” episode of “Parks
and Recreation,” and paused it at a romantic
moment, when one character tells another she
wants them to be together. Mr. Bunker then got
off the couch and down on both knees.
John Fox, a Roman Catholic deacon, led the
ceremony at St. Mary of Our Lady of Grace,
before 40 masked guests, including his parents
from Norwood, Mass., and a few bridesmaids and
groomsmen. The couple later arrived by boat to
the reception in Seminole, Fla., in her parents’
backyard which runs along a canal. They had
their first dance on her parents’ dock as a white
flag with their initials, L & N, waved from a flag-
pole in the yard.
“We’re over-the-moon happy,” she said. “I don’t
think we’ve stopped smiling.”
ROSALIE R. RADOMSKYKISSICK WEDDINGSLyndsey McKenna,
Nick Bunker................................................................................................................................................................................................................Instead, a Short Run to the Altar
David Alexander Gosse didn’t think of
Meredith Moss too often after they
graduated from Olympus High School
near Salt Lake City in 1991. Back
then, he was scared of her ambition.
“I remember her as being this intensely driven
person who was like, ‘Get out of my way! I’m on
a mission to go rule the world,’ ” he said. That he
would find himself spilling his guts to her outside
a boot store in Texas in the middle of the night
nearly three decades later is still kind of a shock.
Mr. Gosse was living in Dallas in June 2019
when Ms. Moss messaged him on Facebook to
tell him she was traveling there on business from
Washington and asked if he wanted to meet up.
He didn’t know what to expect. “But then we got
into this intense conversation and I started vom-
iting emotions all over her shoes,” he said, “and it
felt safe to do that.” They hadn’t talked since at
least the mid-1990s, when both attended the
University of Utah and may or may not have
gone out for a bagel together.
Ms. Moss and Mr. Gosse, both 47, were navigat-
ing life transitions at the time of her business trip.
Ms. Moss, a longtime trial lawyer who never
married, had made a conscious decision to stop
being a workaholic and changed jobs, accepting a
position as principal and associate general coun-
sel at professional services for Deloitte. Mr. Gosse
had also decided to quit tethering himself so
tightly to work. After moving to Dallas post-
college, he started a fire detection company for
commercial buildings, Stratagem. In 2018, he got
divorced.
If Ms. Moss had contacted him even three
weeks earlier, he would have declined her invi-
tation to reconnect. “I was in a period of massive
personal change, and I wouldn’t have been com-
fortable with it,” he said. A friend had been telling
him he needed more “growth opportunities.”
“So I said to myself, worst case scenario it’s
this awkward dinner and I can say later that I did
this horrible thing and it didn’t kill me,” he said.
The horrible thing turned into the conversation
that lasted well past dinner at a Mexican restau-
rant in Grapevine, Texas — until 3 a.m. on the
bench outside the boot store. They talked about
growing up in Salt Lake City and the mystery of
whether they had gone out for bagels in college.
He remembers the outing, she doesn’t. (“But in
her defense, I had a full-blown Moses-type beard
at the time so she may not have known it was
me,” he said.) Outside of reminiscing, “I remem-
ber telling him things I hadn’t told my best
friend,” Ms. Moss said.
When she returned to Washington, they started
having what he called “epically long” phone calls,
“like six, seven hours.” He thought he had found a
soul mate, but not necessarily a life partner.
“Then about a week in, I realized I was having
feelings that are beyond friend,” he said. She was
already experiencing them. “I definitely was
having twinges in that direction that first night,”
she said.
By fall, their phone calls included talk of a
future together in a new city. When Ms. Moss
floated Salt Lake, he was not exactly game. “I
remember putting my hand out in the ‘stop, no’
position even though she couldn’t see me,” he
said. “I fled for a reason.”
Within weeks, though, those reasons no longer
seemed relevant. Both still had close relation-
ships with their families there. After an October
visit, they cemented their plan to uproot them-
selves and buy a house. Two months later, on
Dec. 12, Mr. Gosse proposed near the bench in
Grapevine while Ms. Moss was visiting. “He was
on one knee, and he said beautiful things,” she
said.
In April, they moved back home. On Oct. 10,
they planned to be married at the Salt Lake
Country Club in front of 10 loved ones and 125
Zoom guests by Ms. Moss’s sister, Emily Moss
Gregory, ordained by the Universal Life Church.
But on Oct. 8, two members of Ms. Gregory’s
family tested positive for coronavirus. Ms. Moss
and Mr. Gosse moved their ceremony to their
new back yard, where Ms. Gregory married them
virtually, via Zoom.
“Every day, we’re grateful we found each
other,” Ms. Moss said.
TAMMY LA GORCEPEPPER NIXMeredith Moss,
David Gosse
. ............................................................................................................................................................................................................
This Time, Much More Memorable Than a Bagel
In April 2018, Erik Simpanen was a
graduate student at Brown living in
Providence, R.I., when he swiped
right on the dating app the League.
He matched with Lloyd Mullings, a graduate
student at Boston College Law School who
swiped in the same direction. Mr. Simpanen had
recently ended a two-year long relationship. Mr.
Mullings, who lived in Boston, was newly single,
too.
Texting followed. A week later Mr. Simpanen
(left) arrived in Boston to stay with a friend and
watch the marathon. The two decided to meet his
first night there at Barcelona, a local wine bar.
Expectations were exceeded. Additional drinks
were had at a beer garden a few blocks away.
Then a kiss was shared.
“It was a tiny peck on the lips — in that mo-
ment it was the easiest thing I’ve ever done,” said
Mr. Simpanen, 28, a project coordinator at the
Brown School of Public Health, Center for Alcohol
and Addiction Studies in Providence. “He was
unlike anyone I’d ever met.”
A second date happened the following evening
at Mr. Mullings’s apartment. Chinese food was
ordered. Mr. Simpanen spent the night, then
drove home only to return to Boston that week-
end for a third date.
“My dad found my mom at 27, so I had this
internal clock where I was measuring myself up
against him,” said Mr. Mullings, 30, who had gone
on almost 40 different dates in a six-month period
by the time he met Mr. Simpanen. “I knew this
was it. The second date I saw it, the third date I
let myself believe it.”
In May, the couple decided to be exclusive. In
July, Mr. Mullings, who at 23 had enlisted in the
Army Reserve, received orders to serve in Kuwait
for nine months. Mr. Mullings broke the news
over lunch. “I was scared he would want to put
our relationship on hold,” Mr. Mullings said. “A
reasonable person would. Erik’s sentiment was,
‘We’ll deal with it together.’ It made me feel I’d
won the lottery.”
During their courtship the pair talked about
changing their last name to something they could
share as their own. On route to the airport, as
both felt the sadness from the inevitable goodbye,
Mr. Mullings came up with “Ocean.”
“The minute Lloyd said it, it stuck,” Mr. Simpa-
nen said. “It represented everything we love
about water and who we are. Neither of us
wanted to take the other person’s name. We tried
blending our names together, but it sounded
terrible.”
While apart, daily texts were exchanged. Hand-
written letters were sent. Gifts arrived monthly.
In late August 2019, Mr. Mulling returned. In
October, he moved to New York to work as an
incoming associate at the law firm GoodwinProctor. The two were in different states, again,
and the weekly commuting took a toll. Mr.
Mullings managed to transfer to the firm’s Boston
location. A week after he moved back to Provi-
dence, Covid-19 hit and their trip to Spain, where
Mr. Mullings planned to propose, was canceled.
Instead, the pair went to Newport, R.I., in July
and took a private boat tour.
“Lloyd got down on one knee and started
speaking in Spanish. I’m fluent; he’s self-taught
so it was pretty impressive,” Mr. Simpanen said.
In August, Mr. Simpanen applied to change his
last name to Ocean, a necessary step for one
person to do before a marriage certificate is
issued. (Mr. Mullings planned to change his name
through marriage.)
On Sept. 26, Mr. Simpanen and Mr. Mullings
exchanged vows at India Point Park in Provi-
dence before 14 family members and friends. Mr.
Simpanen’s mother, Judy Lynn Simpanen, led the
ceremony. “My Social Security card hadn’t ar-
rived so it wasn’t legal,” Mr. Simpanen said.
Documentation of Mr. Simpanen’s new sur-
name was needed from the Social Security Ad-
ministration before the couple could receive a
marriage license with his new last name. The
license would then be used by Mr. Mullings to
change his name to Ocean.
On Oct. 8, after the new card finally arrived, a
legally binding ceremony took place at City Hall
in Providence. It was also led by Ms. Simpanen,
who was ordained for the occasion by the Univer-
sal Life Church.
“No matter what happens he will be by my
side,” Mr. Mullings said. “If I could bottle that
feeling that would be incredible.”
ALIX STRAUSSJONATHAN NAJARIAN/JONNY APERTURE PHOTOGRAPHYErik Simpanen,
Lloyd Mullings................................................................................................................................................................................................................Making a Name of Their Own
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