14 ST THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020Vows
WEDDINGS
On Halloween night, under a blue
moon, Vivienne Vermuth and Jason
Perkins, both dressed in black, were
married after a dating life that Mr.
Perkins describes as more layered than an onion.
“There were the romantic days; the sexy days;
the laugh till you snort days; and some days that
felt like the third act of a Tarantino film,” said Mr.
Perkins, 44.
Ms. Vermuth, 36, a graduate of the University of
North Texas in Denton, is a makeup and hair
artist, event producer, and a “campy slash goth”
style burlesque performer. “Think Lucille Ball
meets Tim Burton — over-the-top humor and wild
characters mixed with sensuality,” she said. Mr.
Perkins, who graduated from Texas Culinary
Academy, which was in Austin, is an executive
chef for private clients in the Dallas area.
The two ran in the same circle for years before
romance ever hit their radar, having first met
casually in Dallas after one of her shows in 2012 at
a Viva Dallas Burlesque show. They became
social media friends along the way, and in October
2017, Mr. Perkins reached out to Ms. Vermuth
looking for a “friendly ear.”
“He was going through a divorce and I had just
done that earlier in the year,” she said. “We of-
fered consolation and friendship to each other.”
Although both were leery of dating, they went
on a first date on Nov. 1, 2017. The goal was to
keep it strictly casual. “We even told each other,
‘No feelings!’ ” she said. “But feelings eventually
won.”
Once they began talking, they realized they
were both on the same path, including wanting to
be polyamorous, Ms. Vermuth said. “We both
independently had inklings that traditional rela-
tionship structures weren’t for us,” she said.
But it was one of her dogs that sealed the deal.
Ms. Vermuth says she “melted” when her dog
Hanne, a pit bull, met Mr. Perkins in December
2017.
“Hanne just leaned on Jason and looked up at
him with total trust,” she said. “I realized that
Jason would not only take care of me, but every-
thing near and dear to me, and my dogs trusted
him back.”
In February 2019, Mr. Perkins realized he was
in love, too. “I knew we aligned with each other,
and that she was my teammate,” he said. “There
is so much depth and strength to her. She builds
me up and others around her so much.”
A month later, Mr. Perkins took Ms. Vermuth to
their kitchen chalkboard where he had worked out
financial plans for them in the coming year. “He
grabbed me in his arms and proposed life togeth-
er,” she said. “I immediately said yes. Jason is
tenacious in the best ways. We have a mature
bond that still giggles at bad jokes and watches
comic book movies.”
On Oct. 14, Mr. Perkins decided he wanted to
propose again. “He gathered the pups, got on one
knee, and asked to be my husband, my partner,
and my dogs’ official dad,” Ms. Vermuth said. She
said yes once again.
The pair desired to get married because, al-
though they are polyamorous, they are “the center
of each other’s lives and love,” Ms. Vermuth said.
They call themselves “goth romantics” and were
thrilled to realize 2020 would have the first full
blue moon on Halloween in 76 years. “It’s a big
deal for us,” she said. “It’s a time of cleansing, of
starting over, and I can’t imagine a better time to
do so than right now.”
The couple married in an outdoor ceremony Oct.
31 at Flag Pole Hill Park in Dallas by friend and
fellow performer Honey Sin Claire, an Open Min-
istry minister.
They would have liked to have had more guests
than the 10 that current Covid-19 protocol allows in
Dallas. “We wanted to include our partners and
their immediate family,” Ms. Vermuth said. “So it
got hard very fast. Luckily it’s still about us, our
love, and everyone around us understand and
supports us which is most important.”
Mr. Perkins wore a gray velvet blazer and black
pants. Ms. Vermuth wore a 1931, hand-sewn, black
silk gown with a spider web Art Deco beaded back.
Her sheer black gloves were embossed with velvet
runes. Her bouquet and his boutonniere included
ethically sourced mink skulls with wedding runes
burned into them for love, perseverance, trust and
sensual energy.JENNY BLOCKDEE HILLVivienne Vermuth,
Jason Perkins
................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Once in a Blue Moon, Mink Skulls and Wedding Runes
Thais Prazeres de Almeida was
dating someone else when she and
Scott Nielson met at the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
both attended in São Paulo, Brazil, but he didn’t
see that as an obstacle.
They went out a few times, on friend dates, as
he was relatively new to the city — and the
country — and even in their initial conversation,
she felt that they had much in common.
“I knew he was a lawyer and I wanted to get
to know him,” said Ms. Almeida, 25, who is an
associate at Demarest Advogados, a law firm in
São Paulo. “I had heard from people that he was
working here.”
Mr. Nielson, 33 and a litigation associate in the
São Paulo office of Kobre & Kim, quickly decided
that Ms. Almeida was dating the wrong person,
and boldly told her so.
“I basically told her, asked her, to ditch the
other guy,” he said. “But she didn’t do it.”
A few months later, at the beginning of 2019,
she asked him to lunch and proceeded to tell Mr.
Nielson about her relationship issues.
“I just told her, ‘Well, if you wanted to date
someone else, you could, but you need to make a
decision soon,’ ” he said. “Like a soft ultimatum.”
Her response was swift. In a voice message
soon after their lunch, he said, she told him she
was free on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. “So
let me know,” her message said. “Whenever
you’re available, I’m down to see you.”
“So that was pretty clear to me that she was
interested,” he said.
“I hadn’t ever met someone like him,” she
said. “He was very intelligent, and I also think
he was very sweet. He always treated me so
well, he was always so loving, and kind.”
Ms. Almeida graduated with a law degree
from the São Paulo campus of Universidade
Presbiteriana Mackenzie. Mr. Nielson received a
law degree from Georgetown, and graduated
from Brigham Young University. He also re-
ceived a master’s degree in education from
Fordham, and was a social studies and special
education teacher for two years, from 2012-14, at
Bronx Bridges, a high school in the East Bronx,
as a corps member of Teach for America.
While in his third year of law school, Mr. Niel-
son, already fluent in Spanish, decided to learn
Portuguese. He enrolled in night classes, and
when an internship opportunity in São Paulo
arose a few months later, he leapt on it.
“Then, while I was here, I started looking for
jobs and made some contacts,” he said. A year
later, in May 2018, he returned to the city as alegal associate, and has been in Brazil ever
since.
For the couple’s first proper date, Mr. Nielson
suggested a museum outing. “I didn’t want to do
something that would be perceived as boring,”
he said. “But I also know she’s sort of a home-
body and prefers staying in, so I said, if you
don’t find it to be too boring, we could just watch
a movie and order food, and she just said, ‘Well,
people think that’s boring, but I don’t care.’ ”
“It wasn’t really the first date,” he added. “It
was at least the 10th, or whatever.”
On Nov. 6, the couple was married at a public
notary office in São Paulo, and later, had a cele-
bration of their marriage, with a blessing from
Ms. Almeida’s father, who is a bishop in São
Paulo of the Latter-day Saints church. In Decem-
ber, the couple plan a reception in Salt Lake City
near Bountiful, Utah, where Mr. Nielson’s family
lives.
Just a few weeks after the couple’s romance
commenced, Ms. Almeida blurted out her feel-
ings to Mr. Nielson. “We went to get ice cream,
and we were talking about how he decided to
study law, and he was also talking about his
family and what his family meant to him, and I
just realized that I was in love with him,” she
said. “And then I told him that at the end of our
date, and he was shocked.”
“I was pretty surprised and taken aback,
because of how soon it was, but I thought about
it for a split second, and then said it back,” he
said. “Now she always reminds me that she
loved me first. But I’m like: ‘You’re like one
second ahead. Congratulations!’ ”
NINA REYESALOHA FOTOGRAFIAThais Almeida,
Scott Nielson................................................................................................................................................................................................................Finally Persuading Her to Date the Right Person
Irene Fan Yuan came right out and
told Colin Armand Evran that what he
was wearing — an oversize, worn
brown and orange argyle sweater,clunky black shoes and white bulky socks — was
“hideous.”
“I gave him feedback honestly during class,”
said Ms. Yuan, referring to a popular interperson-
al dynamics course, nicknamed “touchy-feely,”
that they both took in the fall of 2012 during their
second year at Stanford (where each received an
M.B.A.).
“We were already casual friends,” said Ms.
Yuan, who met Mr. Evran their first year there.
But the intense “touchy-feely” class with a dozen
students, which met 10 to 12 hours a week in a
small room, spurred on their friendship.
“Everything Irene does is out of the best inter-
est of her friends,” said Mr. Evran, who took ad-
vantage of her criticism, and fashion-sense, and
asked her to help with a wardrobe makeover.
She rose to the occasion, and audited his closet
by piling up clothes, about two bags full, for Good-
will, followed by a trip to the Stanford mall where
he came away with a few solid-colored sweaters
and khakis and she then wrote up a grid matching
up new and existing clothes.
“I’ve always been into fashion,” said Ms. Yuan,
33, now based in San Francisco as the vice presi-
dent of marketing for North America at Ba&sh, a
women’s fashion brand based in Paris. She gradu-
ated cum laude from Harvard.
Word of the shopping trip reached their other
classmates. “It was as much as a reflection on
Irene as it was on me,” he said with a laugh. “Her
reputation was on the line.”
In 2013, while still at Stanford, he counted on
her shopping savvy for a more professional look
after he founded Yard Club, a software company
for heavy equipment in the construction industry
that he sold to Caterpillar four years later. Mr.
Evran, 37, is now the chief operating officer based
in San Francisco at Protocol Labs, a blockchain
technology company. He graduated with distinc-
tion from the University of Western Ontario in
London, Ontario.
Their shopping trips turned into an annual
event, even after graduation when they each lived
in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco.
In 2016, a mutual friend, Alex Gelman, who sat
next to her at a wedding in Wisconsin, suggested
that she and Mr. Evran, both single at the time,
start dating. And, a couple of weeks later, they
decided to give it a try. Before heading to a
friend’s birthday party together, they first had
drinks and after the party they went dancing at a
bar in the Marina neighborhood. They had their
first kiss.
“Romance added to a really solidly free-flowing
friendship,” he said.
In August 2017 they began a long-distance
relationship for about a year while she worked in
New York for a French clothing label. When she
landed her current job based in San Francisco,
and before moving in with him, she embarked on
another makeover: his bachelor pad.
“He gave away every single piece of furniture
on Craigslist,” she said.
Mr. Evran proposed in 2018 during a trip to
Sintra, Portugal, and they planned a big Arme-
nian-Chinese wedding, with about 200 guests at
the Art Gallery of Ontario Aug. 15 in Toronto. But
the pandemic set those plans aside.
On Nov. 5, they were married at their apart-
ment via Zoom by Michelle Castro-Diaz, a deputy
marriage commissioner at San Francisco City
Hall. Ms. Yuan’s parents drove in from Petaluma,
Calif., to attend, while his parents and brother
watched via livestream from Toronto. Eight close
friends later roasted and toasted them at Char-
maine’s Rooftop Bar & Lounge in San Francisco,
where earlier a few Stanford friends had dropped
off a magnum of Champagne.
“He’s honestly everything I could have hoped
for and more,” said Ms. Yuan, who is taking her
husband’s name. “And, he has a great wardrobe
now.”ROSALIE R. RADOMSKYIrene Yuan,
Colin Evran
. ............................................................................................................................................................................................................
He’s a Sharp-Dressed Man. She Has Made Sure of It.
When Annette Blum recognized Mi-
chael Pearson on Bumble in 2016, she
reacted in a way that only a tech
company employee would: He must
be there to test the user experience, she thought,
as he was in a relationship.
But when she learned otherwise, she wrote on
the app, “My freshman year self is really excited
right now.”
Nearly two decades earlier, in 1997, Ms. Blum
had arrived at Emory University from Denver;
Mr. Pearson, from Rockville, Md., was a junior
there. While Ms. Blum soon harbored a crush on
Mr. Pearson, she remained only somewhat on his
radar.
After college, they both attended business
school, with Mr. Pearson at Harvard and Ms.
Blum at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Occasionally they would bump into each other at
mutual friends’ weddings.
By 2011, both were living in San Francisco. Even
though they now both work at Google, he as the
director and chief of staff at Google Health and
she as a program manager, that was not how they
reconnected.
Ms. Blum, 41, who is also the founder of Shalon,
part Shabbat dinner, part salon for young adults
to engage in social issues, first saw him jog by her
on San Francisco’s Embarcadero in 2011. They had
each moved to the same city and were dating
others. They became Facebook friends, but never
once interacted.
It was only when, now both single, they saw
each other on Bumble five years later, that they
went on an incredibly awkward date to a Golden
State Warriors basketball game. That evening
rekindled their relationship, or maybe just a
friendship; neither knew exactly which.
The ambiguity faded when they watched an
episode of “Game of Thrones” together. Then,
things moved quickly.
Both being the practical sort and not wanting to
waste any time, they discussed race and religion
right away (she’s white and Jewish, he’s Black
and Methodist).
That fall, they attended the Burning Man arts
festival in the Nevada desert. When Mr. Pearson,
43, had a challenging moment on an especially
frigid night, he saw they could talk through it in a
way that had eluded him in previous relation-
ships.
“I can be completely myself with Annette,” Mr.
Pearson said. “She’s been doing food deliveries to
people who are shut in during the pandemic; my
best self wants to do that, but she actually does it.”
“This is a person who I had a crush on when Iwas 18,” Ms. Blum said. “I had no idea that he
would turn into this person who loves me back.
He boosts me and makes me a braver version of
who I had been.”
Mr. Pearson proposed at a surf camp in Costa
Rica in 2019.
They are the rare couple who planned a 2020
wedding and saw it through. A mutual college
friend, Kim Harvey, led a ceremony in Playa Del
Carmen, Mexico, on Jan. 19 with 160 people
present, where they jumped over a broom landing
on a glass, combining the African-American and
Jewish wedding rituals.
“We feel beyond lucky and fortunate,” said Ms.
Blum, who is taking Mr. Pearson’s name. “All I
wanted was my people there, and lots of dancing,
and we got that.”
Their legal ceremony had eluded them however,
first because of the holidays, and then the pan-
demic. When the clerk’s office in San Francisco
reopened after a 2.5-month shutdown and they
reapplied for a new marriage license, they were
given the date of Nov. 4. They were legally mar-
ried the day after the election in their San Fran-
cisco apartment, by Michelle Castro Díaz, a legal
process clerk in the city and county office of San
Francisco, who officiated remotely, with only
Perla, their puppy, present.
With the election results still unknown that day,
Mr. Pearson later said, “In uncertain times, it’s
nice to have someone stable to hold onto.”
ALIX WALLNOVIA MIA PHOTOGRAPHYAnnette Blum,
Michael Pearson................................................................................................................................................................................................................A College Crush Gets Real Two Decades Later