As a pediatric oncology nurse practitioner at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Rachel Glincher is used to bearing witness to heartache and healing. But that didn’t make it any easier when Michael Harris broke her heart in 2018.
Ms. Glincher, 31, met Mr. Harris, 34, a strategic marketing director at Pfizer, on the dating app Hinge after what she estimated had been 1,000 first dates. “I did the New York City dating thing, where I was on all the dating apps,” she said. In December 2017, she matched with Mr. Harris. It took two months for them to arrange a date at the Pony Bar on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where both lived within a few blocks of each other.
“It was only one drink, but we had a great time,” she said. “There was good banter and I left with a really good feeling about it.” A handful of equally successful dates at Manhattan restaurants and bars followed. And then came an unhappy surprise.
“On March 19, I got a text from him saying, ‘Hey, I think you’re great but I don’t feel any chemistry, so best of luck,’” she said. “I replied in the most civilized way I could. I said, ‘I feel quite the opposite, but of course it takes two. If you change your mind, please reach out.’”
Then she called her grandmother, Sandra Glincher, whom she calls Bubbie, in tears. “She said her famous, ‘What’s meant to be will be,’ and hung up.”
Her Bubbie was onto something. In April 2018, Ms. Glincher’s roommate moved out. She found a studio apartment to move into in the building next door to Mr. Harris’s. “It was totally coincidental, but I was hoping to bump into him,” she said. She did, frequently, when they were on their way to early-morning workouts, his at New York Sports Club and hers at Equinox.
“I’d get excited to see him, and he seemed excited to see me,” she said. “I invented a story in my head that he must have been dating someone else when we were dating, and it must have gotten serious.”
Actually, seriousness had been what Mr. Harris was trying to avoid. When they met, he was just getting over a breakup with a long-term girlfriend.
“I knew I liked her, but I didn’t want to dive right into anything,” he said. But their frequent sidewalk chats eventually weakened his resolve. On June 27, he asked her out again. At Workshop, a neighborhood bar, he told her he hadn’t stopped thinking about her.
After bonding over a shared love of travel and mutual frugality — “We’re both incredibly cheap,” she said — they were engaged on July 25, 2019. They planned a May 31 wedding for more than 300 at Camp Pembroke, a summer camp in Pembroke, Mass., that Ms. Glincher attended while growing up. The coronavirus pandemic unraveled those plans. For a while, she was disconsolate. “I didn’t accept it at first.”
Finally, she did. On May 31, the couple toasted each other as their invited wedding guests watched over Zoom. But the actual wedding didn’t happen until July. On July 2, they saw a window of opportunity to make it official as the rate of new infections was slowing in New York and elsewhere in the Northeast. On July 5, they were married by Rabbi Suzanne Offit before 20 guests in her parents’ backyard in Sharon, Mass.
Ms. Glincher wore a tie-dye dress from Wai-Chang. Mr. Harris, in much less formal attire, earned the envy of friends. “They’re all jealous I got to wear shorts,” he said. “I told them, ‘Just plan your wedding only 72 hours in advance and almost anything goes.’”