Sean Gottlieb and Matthew Kerns met for the first time on gay pride day last year in St. Louis, after finding each other on Scruff, a site that helps gay men connect.
Mr. Kerns (right), 47, who is both the executive director of St Lou Fringe, an arts festival organization, and an associate director of Focus St. Louis, a leadership institute, dangled opera tickets that evening for a performance of Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” Mr. Gottlieb, 39, who is a vice president for marketing in the financial advisers subsidiary of Wells Fargo, was intrigued.
“It was totally outside of my experience,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “We went to the opera, and I was infatuated from that moment on.”
Mr. Kerns, too, was convinced that he’d met someone special. “His smile is magical, he’s super funny, his wit is really sharp and the conversation was just effortless,” he said.
Within a month, Mr. Gottlieb was spending most nights at Mr. Kerns’s house in Ferguson, Mo. “I knew this guy is something special to me because I wanted to talk to him all the time,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “He enraptured and captured my attention like no one has ever done before.”
Mr. Kerns proposed to Mr. Gottlieb on his own birthday, in November, and by January, the couple were planning a vacation in New Orleans over the Easter weekend to put together details for the boisterous street-parade wedding they planned to have in 2021.
But when news about the coronavirus pandemic began to become more serious, they reconsidered their situation and worried about what might happen if one of them were to become gravely ill.
“We were flung into the reality, this is not a place — Missouri — where you can be two single gay men and have a guarantee that anyone is going to look at your life partner and say, ‘What do you want for him?’” Mr. Kerns said. “The way we sought to get there was by getting married.”
In March, the two canceled their trip to New Orleans and, after a serious conversation on their customary evening walk through the Gateway Arch National Park with their dog, Lewis, they decided to get married on April Fools’ Day instead.
On March 31, the couple went to City Hall in St. Louis and quickly learned that the bureau had closed. They went back home and the next day, Mr. Kerns started calling nearby counties only to find that they were closed, too.
“Sean’s like, ‘We don’t give up on love, and we don’t give up on each other,’” Mr. Kerns said. “‘Try one more.’”
Seventy or so miles away, in the town of Farmington, Mo., Mr. Kerns found a county office that was open and issuing marriage licenses through a drive-up process. The couple obtained a license without ever getting out of their car.
“I had to take a selfie of us,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “At that point I felt like we were already married.”
They returned to St. Louis, met their officiant, Anthony J. Potts, a Universal Life minister and Mr. Gottlieb’s boss, and two witnesses, and they were married that same day under the Gateway Arch.
“After work trips, every time I would drive into downtown, I knew I was home when I saw the arch, and that’s how if felt when I got married under the arch,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “I have my person. Now I’m home. It felt perfect.”