Andrew Warren Tolman relaxed into a lounge chair next to Jenna Lynn Santoro on July 20, 2019 as the weekly Saturday beach club party was winding down at Gurney’s Montauk Resort in Montauk, N.Y.
“Eating, drinking, running into the ocean, it was a perfect day,” said Mr. Tolman, who had met her briefly earlier that afternoon.
Mr. Tolman, 33, now a vice president in the capital markets group in New York at Houlihan Lokey, an investment bank, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science from Amherst College.
Both exhausted, they chatted over rosé wine as they gazed at the ocean and people-watched for the next hour. They also exchanged numbers. A little before dinnertime, via text, he invited her to join him and his friends at Ruschmeyer’s, a restaurant and bar, that evening for drinks, which overlapped with her dinner.
“I was focused on having fun with my friends,” said Ms. Santoro, 30, “and didn’t want to get my hopes up.”
Ms. Santoro, now a development associate focusing on the Willets Point, Queens, affordable housing project at the Related Companies, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art history from Johns Hopkins and received a master’s degree in real estate development from Columbia.
After dinner she and a friend poked in, and poked out of Ruschmeyer’s. The next morning she and another friend, spent a few hours with Mr. Tolman at Kirk Park Beach, where he and Ms. Santoro tentatively agreed to take the same train back to Manhattan early that evening.
“I was definitely intrigued,” said Ms. Santoro, who had a summer share in Montauk, while Mr. Tolman was staying with friends that weekend.
Later, his friends gave him flack on the train not only for getting up to sit next to Ms. Santoro, but also for spending so much time with her that weekend.
“I’m going to marry this girl so bear with me,” he recalled telling them. “It was my way of saying this is different.”
During the three-hour ride they chatted over rosé wine she had on hand.
“How do I make this weekend not end?” he recalled thinking, as they neared Penn Station.
On the platform he suggested they grab dinner at Rossopomodoro, an Italian restaurant, now closed in the West Village, and across the street from where he then lived.
“What’s going on here?” she recalled thinking, but “I went with the flow.”
After they jumped in a cab, he hauled their bags up to his studio while she waited in his lobby before dinner. As they sat at the restaurant’s bar they enjoyed vodka rigatoni and red wine until the place closed, and ended the evening with a good night kiss before she took an Uber home to Gramercy Park.
“It was a whirlwind few weeks,” he said, as they saw each other two or three times a week. In August, he visited her in Montauk where they went to the Surf Lodge to see their favorite band, Rüfüs Du Sol, an Australian house and techno group.
During the fall they took spin classes together, and she cooked hearty Italian meals at her place, including fried meatballs using her great-aunt’s recipe for Bolognese sauce.
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
“Always with a good wine,” she said. “My dad taught me about wine.”
In December, they swam, ran and golfed, while they visited her parents at their vacation home in West Palm Beach, Fla.
In March after Covid hit New York, their studio apartments began closing in on them. So they temporarily moved into her parents Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan while they were away.
“We went from the mindset of being single to really just being together,” he said, and that summer they rented a car and stayed in no-frills hotels on the North and South Forks of Long Island.
In March 2021, they moved together into a one-bedroom apartment in the West Village.
“It was clear he was going to propose,” said Ms. Santoro, who expected the moment during a trip to Puglia, Italy, in July 2022. “Hey are you not going to propose to me on this trip?” she said, adding with a laugh. “I’m always direct.”
But, Mr. Tolman waited until February 2023. While they visited her parents in Florida, he insisted they take a morning walk along the beach on Singer Island after he uncharacteristically vetoed her suggestions to go on a run or play tennis. So she reluctantly put on her bathing suit and black bucket hat. After walking 15 minutes, he got down on one knee in the sand. “Yes,” she said without hesitating.
The couple were married Dec. 31 at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Cantor Lisa V. Segal officiated at a black-tie ceremony, before 175 guests, who wore black or white or a combination of the two. David Monn, an event planner, for whom the bride’s mother works, decorated in the New Year’s spirit with golds, silvers, as well as touches of champagne pink — the color of the bride’s Naeem Khan gown.
The couple’s first dance, a slowed-down, mellower version of Rüfüs Du Sol’s “Treat You Better” was a nod to their first summer days in Montauk, as was their beach-going honeymoon in Australia and New Zealand.
“We’re having as much fun as the first time we met on the beach,” Mr. Tolman said, during their trip. She added: “It’s the height of summer right now.”