14 ST THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020Vows
WEDDINGSSugar Good, the manager of the
Dunkin’ doughnuts store in Edmond,
Okla., didn’t know much about the
customer in the red truck other than
that he was pleasant and consistent. Each week-
day morning at 7:15, he idled at the drive-
through window while she handed off his sau-
sage, egg and cheese croissant and a large hot
coffee with cream and sugar.
A year would go by before she gathered the
courage to pass him her sprinkle-bedecked busi-
ness card with his breakfast in September 2018.
But when she did, it came as a relief to both. The
man, John Thompson, a recently retired Marine
working as a car salesman in Oklahoma City, had
been wondering how he was going to figure out
what her real name was.
“When I started going through the drive-
through, I noticed she would smile with her eyes,
and I thought, maybe if I read the receipt I can
see what her name is,” he said. “But it said ‘Sug-
ar No. 7.’ ” He figured Sugar must have been a
reference to how he likes his coffee. With the
card, which listed her cellphone number at the
bottom, she cleared up the mystery — as well as
her own case of the blues.
Mr. Thompson, 45, and Ms. Good, 49, are both
divorced. “The day before he called me that
September, I was on my way home from work
and I thought of all the people going home to be
with their families,” she said. “I said to myself,
‘I’m lonely.’ Three tears fell from my eyes.”
By the end of 2018, after a first date at an
Oklahoma City miniature golf course and a few
months of filling in the blanks about the person
at the opposite end of a fuzzed-over fast-food
microphone, they were in love. “The funny thing
is, we were comfortable with each other from the
beginning because we had gotten used to talking
to each other every day,” said Mr. Thompson,
who now works in the parts department at Bob
Howard, the Oklahoma City car dealership. “It
was kind of instant, like we’d known each other a
long time,” Ms. Good said.
In April — neither is sure of the exact date —
Mr. Thompson proposed in the Dunkin’ parking
lot while dropping her off at 3 a.m. for the start of
her morning shift. She said an ecstatic yes. Set-
ting the date took some time. Figuring out a
place to get married did not. “We knew we
wanted to share it with the Dunkin’ family,” Ms.
Good said.
On Oct. 13, Ms. Good took her place inside the
drive-through window in Edmond wearing her
Dunkin’ uniform. Mr. Thompson, in his own
regular work clothes, drove his red truck to Ms.
Good’s window. This time, he had butterflies in
his stomach instead of hunger pangs. Colby
Taylor, a former pastor at Life.Church, stood
between their two windows to officiate a ceremo-
ny that had to be kept short because of the push
of regular customers behind Mr. Thompson.
Toward the end of the ceremony, Ms. Good
rushed outside and Mr. Thompson stepped out of
the truck; a crowd of 30 regulars, friends and
family cheered them as they shared a first kiss
as husband and wife.
Among the crowd was Misha Goli, the owner
of the Edmond store, who had signed on to host
with enthusiasm, splurging on balloons, a dough-
nut bouquet and bubble letter pink-and-orange
signage to alert unsuspecting customers to the
special event. Glazed and maple glazed dough-
nuts, the couple’s favorites, were free to all.
“Sugar connects with everybody,” Mr. Goli said,
meaning the bride, not the substance. “She’s like
family. When we saw how happy John made her,
we knew we wanted to do this.”
Ms. Good and Mr. Thompson, who clinked
coffee cups instead of champagne glasses, were
humbled by the show of support. “Our story
wasn’t glamour, but it was true romance,” Ms.
Good said.TAMMY La GORCEJILLIAN GALLAGHER AND EMMA BURKESugar Good,
John Thompson
................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Met at Dunkin’, Married at Dunkin’
When a teenage Zaid Hassan and his
family moved from Lahore, Pakistan,
to Austin, Texas, in 2002, the culture
shock was immediate.
“We couldn’t tell north from south, east from
west,” he said.
Case in point: In the days after they touched
down, the family saw a sign at a local deli adver-
tising delivery. They walked in and asked about
it.
“We just saw the sign outside that says ‘we
deliver,’ ” Mr. Hassan recalled his parents saying.
“Does that mean you can deliver our boxes from
the airport to our apartment?”
The family had moved to Austin after Mr.
Hassan’s mother accepted a job teaching at the
University of Texas. While Mr. Hassan blossomed
in his new life — he arrived midway through high
school, and by his senior year had been named
prom king — he wouldn’t forget what it was like
to step off a plane in an unfamiliar city.
So when, a little over a decade and a half later,
Mr. Hassan received a message from a woman he
had just met on Hinge asking whether he could
pick her up from San Francisco International
Airport, he was predisposed to say yes — even if
the request wasn’t fully serious.
“I remember being like, ‘There is literally no
way this dude is going to show up,’ ” recalled that
weary traveler, Jennifer Pollan. She said she was
half joking when she sent the pickup request on
her way back to the Bay Area from Washington
in 2018.
But show up Mr. Hassan did.
The conversation they had during the drive
from San Francisco to Berkeley, Calif., where Ms.
Pollan was living, suggested that the favor would
be worth the while. For 45 minutes or so, the pair
had an impassioned debate about the best way to
create political change (Ms. Pollan is a believer
in protests and other forms of direct action; Mr.
Hassan prefers working inside the system) and
an equally passionate discussion about the
virtues of shopping at Costco (an indispensable
institution, they agree).
Their connection deepened when they met for
a follow-up date at a Berkeley dive bar. There,
Mr. Hassan regaled Ms. Pollan with his résumé,
which by that point included more than just
having been prom king: He had worked on Presi-
dent Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in
2011 and 2012, then at the White House’s Office of
Public Engagement. He once biked from Austin
to Anchorage as part of the Texas 4000 charity
bike ride. But Ms. Pollan was most impressedwith a more humble detail: that Mr. Hassan
talked to his mother on the phone several times a
day. “I also talk to my mom several times a day,”
she said. “I never thought I would marry some-
one who probably talks to their mom more often
than I do.”
Marriage would come into focus over the
couple of years that followed, while Ms. Pollan
navigated law school at the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley, and Mr. Hassan worked at Waymo,
Google’s self-driving car company, in Mountain
View, Calif. Mr. Hassan proposed in February. He
still works for Waymo; she is to start as an asso-
ciate at the New York law firm Cleary Gottlieb
Steen and Hamilton in January. They have not
yet determined what city they will settle in.
Ms. Pollan, 29, and Mr. Hassan, 34, were le-
gally married Oct. 9 by Attia Omara, an imam.
They solemnized their marriage on Oct. 10 at the
Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin,
in an interfaith celebration. That ceremony,
which pulled from both Jewish and Muslim
customs, was led by Ms. Pollan’s sister, Lisa
Kessler, and Syed Akbar Hyder, a friend of the
couple. It was followed the next day by a second
ceremony built around Pakistani Muslim tradi-
tions.
Ms. Pollan’s parents, who live in Massachu-
setts, flew to Austin for the occasion. They had a
car rented — but Mr. Hassan met them at the
airport anyway.GABE COHNANNA SZCZEKUTOWICZJennifer Pollan,
Zaid Hassan................................................................................................................................................................................................................Proceed to Baggage Claim for Your Future Husband
William Quinn Briganti was already
on the plane home to New York when
he and Dr. Thomas Strother Edwards
started messaging each other. They
had matched on Tinder in April 2016, while Mr.
Briganti was in New Orleans to take part in a
remote bell ceremony for Nasdaq. Dr. Edwards
was finishing up medical school at Tulane, and
getting ready to move to Atlanta for his medical
residency at the Emory University School of
Medicine.
“I could just tell that Will was a super upstand-ing guy,” said Dr. Edwards (left). “I immediately
trusted him and just found him incredibly inter-
esting, and just knew that it was somebody that I
had a potential connection with.”
Mr. Briganti, 37, and Dr. Edwards, 32, spent the
next few months getting to know each other over
FaceTime, and in June 2016, right before his
residency began, Dr. Edwards took a “leap of
faith” and flew to New York to meet in person.
They went to dinner and a Broadway show, and
soon were flying between New York and Atlanta
every few weeks to see each other.
Their visits usually lasted only a few days, and
in the lulls in between visiting each other, Mr.
Briganti and Dr. Edwards started to write each
other letters.
“We were able to express more about our feel-
ings for one another, more than just in a text or
an emoji,” Mr. Briganti said. “When you’re re-
mote, you’re constantly thinking about the other
person, or at least I was. To see a letter come in
the mail from Thomas was just awesome.”
A few months into their relationship, Dr. Ed-
wards had a whole weekend free, a rarity while
doing a medical residency. Mr. Briganti was
planning to leave from Nantucket, Mass., where
he was on vacation with family, to visit Dr. Ed-
wards in Atlanta for what would be their third
in-person date. The weather forecast had other
plans, and Mr. Briganti’s flight was delayed,
cutting into the couple’s valuable time together.
Determined to see Dr. Edwards, Mr. Briganti took
a ferry from Nantucket to Hyannis, Mass., and a
rental car from Hyannis to New York, only to find
that the flight out of New York wouldn’t get him
to Atlanta in time. Undeterred, he took a grey-
hound bus to Washington and flew to Atlanta
from there, making it to Dr. Edwards’s on Satur-
day morning, in time to spend the valuable week-
end together.
“That was the first point I really kind of real-
ized, oh, he is definitely invested in this and inter-
ested in me and is willing to sacrifice to make a
relationship work and is going to be a great po-
tential partner one day,” Dr. Edwards said.
In July 2018, Mr. Briganti moved to Atlanta to
live with Dr. Edwards. Mr. Briganti is an associ-
ate vice president in corporate communications
at Nasdaq in Atlanta, and Dr. Edwards is the chief
resident in the department of otolaryngology at
Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.
The couple had been talking about getting
married for a while, and Mr. Briganti just had one
request — he wanted to be the one to be proposed
to.
“A lot of my job in communications is organ-
izing and planning,” Mr. Briganti said. “I said, for
this one thing, if I were lucky enough for it to
happen, I would want to be surprised.”
“I was happy to make that happen,” Dr. Ed-
wards said.
On a trip to Nantucket in August 2019, Dr.
Edwards proposed at sunset, on the beach next to
Brant Point Lighthouse, which looks over Nan-
tucket Harbor.
The couple had planned to be married Oct. 10
at the New York Yacht Club in Manhattan, but
changed their plans because of the coronavirus.
They decided to keep their planned wedding date,
and married on Oct. 10 at Scout, a restaurant in
Decatur, Ga. Libby Fischer, a friend of the couple
and a Universal Life minister, officiated.
EMMA GRILLOMICHAELLA JELIN/YELLOW BIRD VISUALSThomas Edwards,
William Briganti
. ............................................................................................................................................................................................................
Falling in Love, One Letter at a Time
Jochen Chang revealed his inner
Prince Charming when he and Leigh-
Ann Michelle Laughlin started dating
in 2019.
“I found him very chivalrous,” Ms. Laughlin
said. “His language was very Jane Austen-y.” It
might have been otherwise if she hadn’t put him
in a royal frame of mind. “Leigh-Ann looks like
Kate Middleton,” he said. “When you meet her
she gives you that Princess Kate look.”
Mr. Chang, 33, and Ms. Laughlin, 31, of Chi-
cago, met through mutual friends in Atlanta in- Both had moved there for work. He is now a
vice president at Alix Partners, a business turn-
around and restructuring company. She is a
manager at Deloitte, a professional services
company. Neither was single at the time, but
when she moved to Houston and he to Chicago
the following year, they kept in touch.
“We would talk about our relationships,” Mr.
Chang said. When Ms. Laughlin got married in
2012, Mr. Chang flew to Houston for the wedding.
When she got divorced in 2017, he was sorry to
hear of her heartache. “She was a good friend. I
wished her the best.”
Privately, though, his wishes were tinged with
longing. “From the very beginning I would talk
to my mom and dad about her, how she’s this
extremely classy woman and how I wanted to be
with someone like that in my lifetime,” he said. In
a 2019 text exchange, she told him she was think-
ing of moving to Chicago. He wrote right back. “I
told her she should come stay in my spare bed-
room for a week so she’d really get a feel for the
city.”
She arrived in August. Halfway through her
stay, he confessed his feelings for her. “He admit-
ted that he had always admired me and that he
wanted to pursue me,” she said. Ms. Laughlin
liked that he had stopped short of asking her
whether the feelings were mutual: “It didn’t put
any pressure on me, which I appreciated,” she
said. “I had always put him in that friend
bucket.”
By the time she was heading back to Houston,
he was still mostly in that bucket. “We had some
great conversations,” she said. “But I was think-
ing, I’ll consider it. I’ll let it roll around in my
head.”
On the plane home, she remembered a list she
had drawn up after her divorce of the attributes
she was looking for in a future partner. She
pulled the list up on her phone. On it were all the
qualities she had seen in Mr. Chang that week:
worldly, considerate, funny, intellectual.
For the next few months, she allowed him to
pursue her long distance. “We were having these
deep, thoughtful conversations,” Ms. Laughlin
said. His determination was rewarded at the end
of the year, when she bought a ticket to Germany
to spend the holidays with Mr. Chang and his
parents, who live in Frankfurt. She had fallen in
love by then, and Mr. Chang’s family drew her in
deeper. “His mom was so welcoming,” she said.
“We made Asian dumplings and they bought me
a beautiful Hermès scarf.”
Two months later, he asked, and received,
permission from Ms. Laughlin’s father, Robert
Tim Axt, to marry her.
Mr. Chang planned to propose on a May visit to
Ms. Laughlin’s dream destination of Cappadocia,
Turkey, but the coronavirus caused him to swivel
to a Plan B. On April 19, on the LaSalle bridge in
Chicago, he got down on one knee and asked her
to marry him. Her yes, he said, was a dream
come true.
So was their Oct. 10 elopement on a friend’s
boat on the Chicago River, officiated by his sister,
Christine Chang, who was ordained by the Uni-
versal Life Church. The ceremony put to rest a
question he had been asking himself for nine
years.
“When you look at someone like a princess,
you’re always like, ‘Am I good enough to play her
prince?’ ” he said. When she pronounced them
married, he finally felt he was.
“She has brought me so much joy,” Mr. Chang
said.TAMMY La GORCECOLETTE MARIE PHOTOGRAPHYLeigh-Ann Laughlin,
Jochen Chang................................................................................................................................................................................................................Finally, Out of the ‘Friend Bucket’
.