E10 OnLove NUPTIALS JAY PREMACK PHOTOGRAPHY
Theresa Monturano & Alejo Pesce
Theresa Monturano, 34, and Alejo Pesce, 36, are wedding photographers. They live in Reston.
Wedding date: May 15.
Location: Viewmont Farm in Charlottesville. Guests: 80.
How they met: In 2003, Theresa worked at a stock photography company in Tysons Corner when Alejo joined the organization. After working together for three years, hanging out during lunch, Theresa moved to Los Angeles for work. Several days after her move, Alejo called and confessed he liked her. She was shocked. They then talked every night on the phone and sent each other handmade gifts. It wasn’t until Theresa moved back to Virginia and Alejo quit his job at the company in 2007, however, that they began seriously dating.
The proposal: Alejo suggested they hike Bull Run Mountain in May 2009. Though she didn’t consider herself a hiker, Theresa was game. When they stumbled upon a clearing, they had a bite to eat. Then, Alejo kissed her and was so nervous that Theresa says she could feel his heart beating. He then, she says, muttered “Marry me.”
The wedding: They held the event at Alejo’s mom’s property, where they could enjoy the outdoors. A thunderstorm the night before knocked out the home’s water and electricity, however, so Alejo was freaking out trying to find a working shower. (Luckily, everything returned to working order two hours before the wedding.) For the reception, Alejo folded origami birds for each table, and he and Theresa wowed guests with their ballroom dance. With Theresa still in her gown, the two climbed a fence and lighted a sky lantern to top off the evening.
Honeymoon: A fall trip to the Caribbean or Angkor Wat, Cambodia.
—Kathleen Hom
To watch a video profile of Theresa and Alejo, log onto
www.washingtonpost.com/onlove this Thursday.
KLMNO
ON LOVE ONLINE • Join us at
www.washingtonpost.com/onlove where you’ll find videos, photos, advice and polls.
• Want to be featured in OnLove? E-mail
onlove@washpost.com to find out how to be considered for coverage in these pages or in our new video series.
SUNDAY, JUNE 6, 2010
• This Thursday we’ll launch a new online video series capturing the love stories of recently married local couples. To watch, please visit
www.washingtonpost.com/ onlove.
KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST SWEPT AWAY: Kevia Shepard, left, and Shannette Matthews jump over a broom during their wedding at BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown on May 16. by Ellen McCarthy It was one of those flip, impulsive
gestures. Kevia Shepard had worked all day at the Pentagon before rolling down the windows of her Corvette, turning on the radio and driving to Northeast Washington to visit a friend. When she saw a cute girl whose abs were shown off between a sports bra and athletic shorts, Shepard honked twice, waved teasingly and drove on. Then, as she began unloading her trunk a block up the street, she saw the woman walking toward her. “I was like, ‘Ohhh, okay — she’s com- ing over here,’ ” Shepard recalls. She couldn’t have known, in that in- stant, how much courage was required for Shannette Matthews to take those steps. Matthews can be profoundly shy, and wasn’t sure Shepard was a lesbian, but a friend who’d witnessed the honk pushed her to take the chance. Matthews introduced herself and
asked what brought Shepard to her Mayfair neighborhood. The two made small talk until Shepard’s friend called her inside. But the smile Shepard shot before she walked away convinced Matthews that her approach wasn’t un- welcome, so she asked for a phone number. “And she said, ‘Well, are you going to call me? Don’t take my number if you’re not going to call me,’ ” Matthews recalls. Matthews promised that she would, but Shepard called first — that same night — setting up a date for later in the week. She didn’t know then that Matthews, at 22, was 13 years younger than she.
SNAP! PHOTOGRAPHY
Holly Thomsen & Jeremy Wetzel
Holly Thomsen and Jeremy Wetzel are both 34 and live in Arlington. She is a communications director, and he is a senior interactive media engineer.
Wedding date: May 22.
Location: The Barns at Wolf Trap, Vienna. Guests: 100.
How they met: Holly was about to cancel her
Match.com subscription in 2006, but it was automatically renewed before she got the chance. A month later, while hiking out west, she checked her e-mail at a national park kiosk and saw a funny message from Jeremy. He had discovered her profile and liked that Holly also enjoyed concerts and sports. When Holly returned home a week later, she e-mailed back. The two exchanged notes for three weeks before meeting in person at The Improv.
The proposal: They had looked at rings, but Holly had no clue Jeremy was going to pop the question until the bill came in the mail (Jeremy had bought the ring without her). During the Fourth of July last year, a week after Holly saw the bill, they walked to the Air Force Memorial to watch the fireworks. As the festivities were winding down, Jeremy said “I have one more sparkly thing for you" as he pulled out the ring.
The wedding: The two are music lovers and incorporated that passion into their decor. They created a 3-D sculpture using records and drums were converted to cake stands. During their engagement photo session, they mimicked some famous album covers, which were hung on the walls during their cocktail hour.
Honeymoon: A cruise to the southern Caribbean.
—Kathleen Hom 10 YEARS LATER Lisa and Steve Miller: A team, through yang and yin by Ellen McCarthy
“Yang seeks yin. Smart, fun, handsome, 34-year-old SWPN seeks mysterious con- nection.” Lisa Miller’s best friend thought that answering the personals ad was a bad idea. The guy looking for love in The Washington Post “sounded weird.” “And I said, ‘Yeah, but I’m weird,’ ” Mill- er recalls. “And she said, ‘Yeah, but you’re not weird like that.’ ” Miller called anyway, leaving a message in mailbox #29780.
She was the single mother of a 4-year- old boy in 1999, two years out from a di- vorce and tired of letting her next bad re- lationship deter her from dating. She’d also recently decided she was never again going to mold or mask herself for the sake of a man. “I’d spent too long changing myself to be the person I thought the guy I was with wanted me to be,” she says. “I was going to be who I am and have my interests and do my thing, and if the person I was dating didn’t like that, then it wasn’t the person for me.” Steve Miller, meanwhile, was “playing
the law of large numbers” when he took out the ad. The engineer had also been married briefly in his 20s, and by the late ’90s was on a serious dating mission, go-
“The next morning I called my best friend and said, ‘I think I met my future wife,’ ” Steve says. And 10 years ago, on May 27, 2000, his premonition became a reality. From the beginning, the two felt at home with each other, able to laugh and talk easily. But it wasn’t until they signed up for a few premarital counseling ses- sions that Steve began to feel the gravity of becoming a stepfather to Kai, who was then 5. “The counselor asked me, ‘You re- alize that Kai comes first, before you, at all times, right?’ ” he recalls. “And nobody had ever said that to me before.” He and Kai bonded easily, and seeing Lisa as a parent made Steve— for the first time — really want kids of his own. They soon added daughters Carson, now 8, and Lainey, 6.
SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
THE PERFECT COMPLEMENTS: Steve and Lisa Miller met 10 years ago through a Washington Post ad.
ing out with four or five women a week, quickly assessing what worked for him, and what didn’t. They met for a walk around Roosevelt
Island that turned into a 12-hour date when she invited him up to her apart- ment for wine and pizza (neither of which she had at the ready — pizza was ordered, Steve was dispatched for wine).
And along the way they learned how to
fight. It wasn’t something Lisa had much experience with. “In my first marriage I was constantly afraid: ‘If I disagree with him, he’s going to leave me,’ ” she says. “So Inever said anything,and I never did any- thing.” At first it seemed that conflicts with
Steve, 45, would be nearly as traumatic as she’d feared in her first marriage. Steve is the reflective type — “I like to just go off and think about things,” he says. And that only made it worse for Lisa, 42, who says she “can’t stand things hanging over us. I
want to talk it out until it’s done.” Over time they learned how to laugh
even as they argue (one heated discussion memorably turned into a water fight), and they learned how to read each other. “Now I know that I need to give him his space,” she says. “But he also knows that he can’t keep me at bay for days on end.” Time together has evaporated into a frenzy of track meets, taekwondo lessons and soccer games, but there is always at least 20 minutes together, at the end of the day, for what she calls a “postmortem.” And when they’re all talked out, that now seems all right, too. “We’ve perfected the art of comfortable silence,” she says.
Lisa apologizes for her sappiness be- fore adding that she loves “being married to my best friend.” And it’s the friendship she’s come to value most. Romance ebbs and flows, she says, motioning her arm like a wave, but the fact that they really like each other has come to mean more to the marriage than she ever expected. “When I’ve felt most close to him is when we have a sick kid and we’re up at 2 in the morning and I’m holding hair back and he’s getting a cold compress. We’re a team and a unit,” she says. “And we’re in it together.” And even 10 years later, she still uses the e-mail signature “YinMetYang.”
mccarthye@washpost.com
Shepard, who had spent eight years in the Navy as an intelligence analyst, had married a boyfriend of four years when she was 23. A year-and-a-half lat- er, they divorced. In 2004, she came out as a lesbian to her family and friends — who reacted with casual non- chalance — but she had yet to develop any sort of gay community. “All of my friends were straight. My friends are
married with kids,” Shepard says. So, of Matthews, she thought, “Oh, I get to hang out with a cool person and maybe she can show me the lifestyle and show me around and take me out to clubs and we can hang out and have fun.” Though she was younger, Matthews had a more established set of gay friends. The District native, who is a triplet, came out to her family at age 14. (Her grandmother said she’d known all along.) She’d accrued pals from her days at Calvin Coolidge High School and Lincoln Tech in Baltimore. Over dinner at a Friday’s in Green- belt they talked about their families and backgrounds and laughed about “a
face as she started her car each morn- ing. None of this was mentioned to Mat-
thews. “In the beginning, you really don’t want to tell people all your problems. They might think, ‘Oh she’s crazy.’ Or, ‘What’s wrong with her?’ ” Shepard says. “So I kinda kept it bottled up in- side.”
But one day in October, Shepard un- leashed, pouring out her despondency to Matthews. “I said, ‘Then why are you doing it?’ ”
Matthews recalls. And more than that, Shepard says, Matthews surprised her by saying, “I’m
‘I made her talk to me and open up.’
Kevia Shepard & Shannette Matthews
creepy guy” who kept staring at them. It came out that Matthews was 22, and “I’m like, ‘Wow, she’s a baby,’ ” Shepard recalls. But by then it didn’t matter — the evening still ended with a kiss. For months it turned out to be just
what Shepard had hoped — a series of low-pressure dates to clubs, parties and each other’s houses. They intro- duced each other to their families, but there was no expectation of serious commitment. Shepard, meanwhile, was growing increasingly miserable with her work as a government contractor. She was waking up before 5 a.m. each day to drive from Germantown to the Penta- gon, often staying late to let the traffic pass in the evening. She was making nearly $80,000, but found little satis- faction in the work. More and more of- ten, there’d be tears rolling down her
here for you. And I’ll be there to sup- port you. Don’t worry — whatever you decide to do, I’ll be there for you and everything will be okay.” Leaning on others did not come nat-
urally to Shepard, nor did letting any- one in on the less sunny corners of her interior world.
“So I was just all in her face, every
day, 24 /7,” says Matthews, who is an as- sistant director at an after-school pro- gram in Gaithersburg. “I made her talk to me and open up.” Within the month, Shepard quit her job, facing unemployment and a dra- matic downshift in lifestyle. Evenings out evaporated; the Corvette was sold; meals came from Shepard’s kitchen not those of their favorite restaurants. Mat- thews, now 25, was soon spending more time than not at Shepard’s town- house, and suddenly Shepard, 38,
found herself wondering, “Is this the right person for me? Is there going to be a future with me and her?” The answer came sooner than she
expected: On Shepard’s birthday — Valentine’s Day 2008 — Matthews pro- posed. Though they hadn’t discussed marriage, Shepard immediately said yes.
Shepard’s first wedding took place in
a courthouse and she’d cried through- out the day. No one pushed her into the marriage, but after four years of dat- ing, it just seemed like the right thing to do. This time around, she vowed, the ceremony would be more joyous and much more public. So for two years, they planned what
they expected to be a May 2010 com- mitment ceremony. But in March, they saw that gay marriage would be legal- ized in D.C., “and that immediately changed our commitment ceremony into a wedding,” Shepard says. Heeding the advice of their officiant, Bonnie J. Berger, they exchanged offi- cial vows quickly, fearing the legisla- tion would be overturned. On April 16, in a booth at Ledo Pizza on Georgia Av- enue NW, they pledged their lives to each other during the lunch time rush. Then Shepard ate a calzone; Matthews had the pizza. A month later, on May 16, 100 family members and friends watched as Shep- ard and Matthews placed rings on each other’s fingers and jumped the broom together. After the ceremony, guests cheered loudly as they exited a gallery of the BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown to the Rick James song “You and I.” Even after the wedding, Shepard
marveled at the way a quick horn honk and the constancy of a much younger woman brought her back to married life. “Once I let the guard down and let her in and realized, ‘Okay she really is here for me, she really is about me’— that made me feel a lot more at ease and allowed me to just fall in love with her,” Shepard says. “And I just love her more today than I did yesterday.”
mccarthye@washpost.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164