“I was just hanging on every word,” he said. “I was really captivated by her presence and energy.”
Afterward, she had a birthday party to go to, and he walked her there. She impulsively kissed him.
“And he said, ‘I don’t normally kiss on the first date,’” she said. “I was so embarrassed.” Mr. Gehlken said that what he actually said had included a loophole.
“I said, ‘I usually don’t kiss on the first date, but technically this is a first-date-and-a-half,’” he said. “It was a joke that didn’t quite sync up there.”
On their second and a half date, they explored Oakland. For the third, she arrived at his apartment with bags and bags and bags of supplies: all the fixings for pizza — dough, sauce, cheese and every imaginable topping — as well as a DVD player, her five favorite movies, and an entire concession stand’s worth of movie candy.
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They were soon in love.
“We would have as much fun going out to a nice restaurant or hearing live music as staying in and playing this card game that his grandparents used to play,” she said. “I could see us into the future.”
On June 20, the couple were married in Washington, in the backyard of the bride’s mother’s house. They self united, as allowed by District of Columbia statute, with 13 people in attendance and as many as 175 watching on a livestream.
“It’s a very challenging time, with the pandemic and in terms of what’s going on culturally, societally, with race relations,” said Ms. Raines, whose father is Black and mother is white. “But I didn’t want to wait to start our life together, and I wanted to bring some joy back into our lives and our families’ lives.”