E8 OnLove NUPTIALS CONNOR STUDIOS
Dianna Rodriguez & Luke Marlowe
Dianna Rodriguez, 22, is a courthouse deputy clerk. Luke Marlowe, 24, is a firefighter-paramedic. They live in Arlington.
Wedding date: May 22.
Locations: Holy Trinity Catholic Church, Northwest Washington, and Strathmore Mansion, North Bethesda.
Guests: 140.
How they met: Dianna was a Gettysburg College student and had volunteer firefighter friends at the local station. In April 2007, they invited her to a dinner party where she met Luke, who was also a Gettysburg firefighter. There were some sparks that night, Dianna says, so she invited him to a dance performance she was choreographing the following weekend.
The proposal: Dianna’s grandmother loved meeting Luke when he and Dianna visited her Chesapeake home in the summer of 2007. She told Dianna to hang on to him; he’s a good one. Before she passed away in December 2008, Dianna’s grandmother gave her engagement ring to Dianna’s mother to later pass on to Dianna. In 2009, Luke and Dianna went on a spring break trip to Clearwater Beach, Fla., and Luke surprised her with the ring on the beach at sunset.
The wedding: The ceremony was in the same church that Dianna’s parents got married in more than 25 years ago. Dianna made the place cards and table numbers, while Luke put together the favors. The groom’s cake was a reproduction of the fire truck Luke works on.
Honeymoon: Drove through a volcano and saw waterfalls in St. Lucia.
— Kathleen Hom
KLMNO
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TRACY A. WOODWARD/THE WASHINGTON POST THEN HE WAS GONE: After a night of serious conversation, Javarro Russell disappeared from Angele Douglas’s life. They got a second chance years later. by Ellen McCarthy
It was one of those nights that seemed somehow electrified. Even when she talks about it now, al- most a decade later, Angele Douglas’s face is overtaken by a faraway smile and her sentences become punctuated with contented sighs. In January 2001, the second semester of her freshman year at the College of Charleston, Douglas got dressed up for a sorority party at the school’s student center. Early on, she bumped into Javar- ro Russell, a cute boy she’d never seen before, though it turned out they were in the same year and lived in the same dorm. The two danced all night, finding each other again and again when a good song started to play. He walked her back to their dorm and told her he’d meet her at her room in a few minutes. “I was like, ‘Okay, it’s 3 a.m. — what does he want to do at 3 o’clock in the morning? I hope he doesn’t think we’re doing anything,’ ” Douglas recalls. Hearing a knock, she opened the door
JENNI GREEN/STUDIO DIANA
Michelle Gallinger & James Donohoe
Michelle Gallinger, 34, is a digital archivist. James “Jad” Donohoe, 35, is a development director. They live in Northwest Washington.
Wedding date: May 15.
Location: University of Virginia Chapel in Charlottesville and Keswick Hall in Keswick, Va.
Guests: 150.
How they met: In 2001, Michelle and Jad were University of Virginia graduate students. They ran into each other at English department parties and every Tuesday when they watched “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” at a mutual friend’s home. At the end of the year, Michelle asked this friend for Jad’s number and invited him to a sushi restaurant. Midway through their evening out, Jad asked, “Is this a date?”
The proposal: Last December, Michelle took Jad on an after-Christmas weekend getaway to Charlottesville. One evening they went to the restaurant where they had their first date. Jad was carrying the engagement ring, which was an art deco piece his dad had once given to his mom. “It was burning a hole in my pocket,” Jad says, so after the meal he decided to surprise Michelle and pop the question.
The wedding: The two wanted a short engagement so they could get to the good stuff, Jad says. A friend officiated at the nuptials, other friends played music, and they had everyone sign as witnesses to their vows.
Honeymoon: Spain and Morocco. — Kathleen Hom
SOCIALIZING For less than memorable dates, next meetings are tricky by Lisa Bonos
That guy over there — the one perus- ing the produce at Safeway — looks fa- miliar. A friend of a friend? An old class- mate? Wait: Have we been on a date? With Washington’s interconnected so- cial and professional circles, running into someone you’ve dated can be more than a bit awkward. Especially when one, or both, of you don’t remember each oth- er.
Dating expert Evan Marc Katz, 37, says such re-meetings are common among ur- ban daters. “When you’re talking about 100 dates over five years, it’s sort of not surprising.” If you’re dating frequently and you didn’t go on more than one date — and nothing memorable happened — dates can tend to blend in, Katz says. In fact, Katz’s best friend found him- self in such a situation. It took those dat- ers about 30 minutes into their second date — years removed — to realize that they’d been out before. Katz likens such a meeting to running
into someone familiar at a party and try- ing to figure out how you know each oth- er.
“You just gotta try to get a good laugh out of it; what else can you do?” he says. Andrea Latta, 26, had gone out for drinks with a guy; they’d had a good time and texted occasionally, but their travel schedules kept them from a follow-up date. One night, about three months af- ter their first date, she got a text from him, inviting her to join him at a bar in Arlington.
But when she showed up and said hel- lo, he didn’t seem to recognize her — or their plans to meet up. “He said ‘hi’ as if you’d say to someone squeezing in at the bar and then turned away,” Latta says. “I don’t know if he thought I was someone else, if he had mixed me up with some other girl in his phone.” Latta decided not to “out” him, a move
that D.C. style consultant Celena Gill says is smart. The best way to handle such a situation, she says, is to give the other person a subtle opening.
Simply say: “Haven’t we met before?” With enough conversation, the other person might figure it out. But if not, don’t dwell: Keep the conversation mov- ing, she advises. “If you had a bad experience, you don’t want them to ask you out again,” Gill cau- tions. “Skip it, leave it in the past.” Which is exactly what Lani Rosen-
stock Inlander did when a familiar face didn’t remember her. Rosenstock Inlander, a style consul-
tant devoted to making others appear memorable, showed up for a photo shoot in Brooklyn and almost immediately was prepared for an awkward run-in. A guy she had dated for just a month, about five years earlier, had lived in the building where the shoot was taking place. She went back for several shoots, and
one day walked smack into Tim — and his wife.
“I said: ‘Hi, how are you?’ And he just thinks I’m someone walking in the door, saying ‘hi.’ . . . It was a complete blank, like he had never seen me in his entire life,” she says.
“If I kiss someone good night — even if it was just once and not a big deal — I’m not going to forget what they look like.” Sam Yagan, chief executive for the on-
line dating site OkCupid, says online dat- ers often run into each other in person after only having “met” online. “People don’t realize at the time what’s happening,” Yagan says. “It’s only when one person is back in front of their com- puter” that he realizes that cute girl from Starbucks looks familiar because of her online profile.
While the ability to recognize faces
varies by person, attraction might play a role: Research shows that oxytocin (sometimes called the “love hormone”) improves social memory, and it can be released in processes related to attrac- tion, such as sympathy, empathy and so- cial touch, says Abigail Marsh, an assis- tant psychology professor at Georgetown University. However, “any strong emo- tion improves memory,” Marsh says. “Negative emotions, if anything, create even stronger memory.”
bonosl@washpost.com
to find that 19-year-old Russell had changed, she says, into a red silk robe and slippers. “He looked like a black Hugh Hefner. It was so funny.” Douglas let him in and began mental- ly preparing the speech about how “he’s not getting anywhere with me,” as Rus- sell sat down on her bed. She lay down next to him and they began to talk, about their childhoods, their home towns, the careers they hoped to pursue after college. It was well after the sun came up that Russell stood to leave. He told Douglas he was pledging a fraterni- ty that semester — a warning she un- derstood to mean he wouldn’t have much time for girls. He walked away without even having tried for a kiss. “I thought my breath smelled or
something,” she says. “At the end of the night I was like, ‘Man, we sat here and we connected so well, and we didn’t even kiss?’ ”
Douglas was sure she’d see Russell around, despite his obligations as a pledge. But she never spotted him that semester, or the next year, when they
lived in different dorms. She looked him up on his fraternity’s Web site once, but his name wasn’t listed. Then someone mentioned that Russell had transferred schools and moved away. “He was just gone,” she says. Russell, for the record, is certain the robe was terry cloth and is pretty sure it wasn’t red. He does admit there were slippers involved — “I was getting com- fortable,” he explains. And he had a rule: Never kiss a girl on the first oppor- tunity, “where you meet and have a laugh, and you know you kinda like each other. I was waiting for the second
all the minority students who enrolled at the College of Charleston as freshmen in 2000. He searched for as many names as he could find on MySpace and Face- book, and sent out a mass e-mail with the photo. “I was like, ‘Oh my God — that’s him!
That’s the guy!’ ” Douglas says. She re- plied quickly, trying to play it cool with an e-mail about much she missed col- lege. No response. The following spring, when Douglas was clerking for the Supreme Court of Uganda, she sent a blast e-mail with pic- tures of the country to everyone whose
‘I never wanted to fall in love on accident’
Angele Douglas & Javarro Russell
one.” As the Iraq war ramped up in the summer of 2002, word came that both of Russell’s parents — officers in the Army — would be shipped out. He with- drew from the College of Charleston and moved back to Norfolk to act as a guardian for his younger sister, who was entering her senior year in high school. “It was a tough time, ’cause I really
didn’t want to leave,” Russell says. He finished his undergraduate stud-
ies at Norfolk State University and stayed there to get a master’s in clinical psychology.
Douglas joined the Peace Corps after
college, serving in Tanzania. She re- turned to the States in 2006 to attend the Charleston School of Law and was in the fall semester of her first year when an e-mail from Russell popped into her inbox. Between patients at his private thera-
py practice, Russell had gone through a box of old photos and found a picture of
addresses had been captured by her Gmail account. This time Russell re- plied, asking about her time overseas and the cost of a trip to Africa. She returned to the United States,
and that July they began trading instant messages. Both had recently called off long-term relationships and found themselves relying on their daily online exchanges for happy distractions. The next month, when Douglas’s mother had lung cancer diagnosed, it became more than that. “It was just really comforting to be able to talk to him,” Douglas says. “He seemed very easy to chat with, and he said the right things to me to help me get through everything.” “It’s kinda like I was just at the right
place at the right time,” Russell says. “I felt like there was something growing there, as far as a friendship, at least. So I really wanted to be there for her.” By September she started calling him “buddy,” to keep it straight in her mind
that they were not romantically in- volved. But everything she’d thought about him that night back in college — that he was a kind soul with a big heart and a great sense of humor — had been reinforced through their months of in- stant messaging. In November he told her he was com- ing to Charleston, ostensibly to visit his grandmother. This time, after he knocked, “we just
hugged in the doorway for like five min- utes,” recalls Douglas, now 28. That weekend, Russell got his “second oppor- tunity,” and they had their first kiss. When he drove out of town he called his mother to say, “I think I may have found the one for me.” “It kinda fit the way I would have
liked to have fallen in love” he says. “I never wanted to fall in love on accident. I wanted it to be a conscious thing — there’s a friendship there that you build on and then you decide that you can make this happen.” By the next month they were a cou-
ple. In the fall of 2008, the physical dis- tance between them grew when Russell, also 28, enrolled in a PhD program at James Madison University, but neither expressed an inkling of wanting out. In May 2009, the week of her law school graduation, he proposed. That July Douglas’s mother was told she had three months to live. When she died in October, Russell and his mother were there with Douglas. “I always said that I would know I’m with the right person if I loved him with the same intensity that I do with my mom. And I do,” she says. “His whole family is my family now.” On May 29, the two were married in the atrium of the Tower Club in Tysons Corner. Looking back, both think of their re-
lationship as one sparked by serendipi- ty but sustained with a very deliberate devotion. “We have an understanding that our
relationship is much more than our emotions — it’s a process that we’ve elected to embark on for the rest of our lives,” Russell says. “And I think we meet each other right there — at that point where we’ve made that commitment — every day.”
mccarthye@washpost.com
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