“It just felt like everything was aligning for us to be together,” said Ms. Gould, 29 and a senior strategist at Area 23, a pharmaceutical advertising agency in New York. She graduated from Columbia.
By Valentine’s Day, when the two had lunch with his parents in the theater district — grasshopper tacos were on the menu — Mr. Stamatis realized he was serious about the relationship, and she was too.
“It shows how much Danica wanted to make a good impression on my parents, because she is a very picky eater,” he said.
As they grew closer and more serious about the direction of their relationship, both said that finding how family-oriented the other was mattered a lot.
“The time I’ve been with her has been probably the happiest time of my life,” said Mr. Stamatis.
At another family get-together, they learned the couple’s mothers had both grown up in Union, N.J., and one of Ms. Gould’s uncles had been a grade-school classmate of Mr. Stamatis’s mother.
Their wedding, on Aug. 1, was, of course, a family affair, even with the restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic. The couple married at the Mansion at Natirar, in Peapack-Gladstone, N.J. Brian D. Robbins, who is a Universal Life minister, officiated. The wedding had just 25 people, down from the couple’s original plan to host 200.
“So it felt like our families were always meant to be together,” Ms. Gould said. “They just didn’t realize what generation, and how long it would take.”