Dr. Richard Gregory Ellis and Jana Groh connected in April 2017 on Craigslist while he was looking for an apartment in Cambridge, Mass., and she was desperately seeking a roommate before her lease was up.
“I had two different offers,’’ said Dr. Ellis, who was taking a medical Spanish course in Ecuador before starting a yearlong residency in July at Mount Auburn Hospital. “A Danish lady with a piano, and Jana, who both had a cat and liked board games.”
Dr. Ellis, 31, is a third-year resident in the physical medicine and rehabilitation department at Rusk Rehabilitation at NYU Langone Health in New York. He works there, as well as Bellevue Hospital and the Manhattan VA Medical Center. He graduated from Brown, received a master’s degree in biomechanics from the University of Colorado and a medical degree from Boston University.
“He seemed nice enough, and pretty normal,” said Ms. Groh, 35, when he moved in that June. She now teaches German, English and German as a foreign language at the middle and high school at German International School New York, a bilingual private school in White Plains, N.Y. She graduated from the University of Rostock in Rostock, Germany.
They watched television together. She introduced him to children’s German television to help with his German. (He had lived in Bremen, Germany, in the summer of 2008.) They also teamed up with friends every couple of weeks for the board game Pandemic Legacy, where players have a year to save the world against diseases that spread and mutate.
“He was the best roommate I had in America,’’ she said.
In January 2018 as she planned to move back to Germany, their relationship took a romantic turn, and she decided to stay.
“He’s very honest and trustworthy, and I highly value that,” she said.
Six months later, he began his residency in New York, and they traveled back and forth until she managed to get a teaching job in New York to begin the next school year.
“She gave me a cat food bowl as a Christmas gift,’’ he said, and to his delight it became obvious quickly that she would be moving to New York. He had the bowl ready when he, Ms. Groh and Canavar, her Turkish street cat (she taught in Istanbul from 2010 to 2015) got an apartment together in July 2019.
Six months later, in mid-January 2020, their two-year anniversary, he proposed in German, and got down on one knee at the NoMad Restaurant, to which she said yes, in English.
“Jana lets me be myself,” said Dr. Ellis. He stepped up to volunteer at Bellevue Hospital where he worked 12-hour shifts in the emergency room for two weeks in April during the coronavirus surge.
The couple planned a micro-wedding April 6 at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau with 10 people. But after the coronavirus outbreak they decided on even a smaller wedding, which they referred to as a “nano wedding” at Gapstow Bridge in Central Park, with only two other people, but called that off, too.
“Two days before he came down with a fever,’’ she said, “and I followed a day later.” He was sick for a few days, but she was in bed for three weeks in April. Dr. Ellis said it was most likely the coronavirus.
Their rings, with April 6 in mind, were engraved the European way (day/month/year/) as 6/4/20, but now works as their new wedding date if read the American way. They were married June 4 in Bryant Park, in front of the statue of William Cullen Bryant, an American poet, and the park’s namesake. Goran Veljic, affiliated with Rose Ministries, officiated, with Dr. Nimish Bhatt, the groom’s roommate from medical school, present.
“Since it was the third attempt it was a feeling of big relief,’’ Ms. Groh said.