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SUNDAY, AUGUST 8, 2010


WHAT YOU’LL FIND ONLINE • Our OnLove questionnaire, which couples can fill out to be considered for coverage. • Videos, photos, advice and polls.


DEB LINDSEY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST TOUCHDOWN: Jocelyn Hines and Jason Thomas — finally — shared their wedding day with family and friends on July 30. The two wed in Baltimore several months after a first wedding attempt failed. by Ellen McCarthy


Jason Thomas did not intend for his post-NFL career to include a stint as a wedding planner. But when circumstanc- es of his own creation required it, the for- mer offensive lineman picked up a stack of bridal magazines and got to work. Almost six years before he learned about centerpieces or vendor contracts, he was playing for the Baltimore Ravens and nursing a broken heart. A self-im- posed hibernation went on for months, until his teammates had enough and forced Thomas out of the house. Finally at a bar, the one girl he talked to was the love interest of a buddy and the only conversa- tion that he could manage was a confes- sion of his agony. Her response: “You need to meet my sister.” “I was like, ‘Whatever. I’ve heard that


before. I’ll probably never see you again,’ ” he recalls. By New Year’s Eve 2004, he was on the mend and planning to spend the night with a group of pals, including a North Carolina woman who was coming to town mostly to see him. Then a buddy called: He needed Thomas to come to Washing- ton to go on a double date with the wom- an from the bar and her sister. “I was like, ‘No way. I can’t leave my date right now to go down to D.C. to meet some other girl,’ ” he says. But the friend was relentless, call- ing and finally showing up at the door of the house where Thomas was hanging out that afternoon. Capitulating, Thomas apologized to the


North Carolina woman and told her he’d be back by early evening. Then he got in the car and fumed. Jocelyn Hines was much more ambiv- alent about the upcoming rendezvous. She was a medical resident, working close to 100 hours a week and trying to enjoy a rare day off. When her sister, Ja-Na, told her to put on some makeup because they


were going to meet a couple of guys, Hines shrugged and followed orders. By the time they met, Thomas’s mood


had thawed. Seated around the bar at Or- tanique (now home to Posh), the four paired off into separate conversations. Thomas found himself drawn in by Hines’s energy and irreverence; Hines didn’t feel nervous with him, the way she usually did around guys. “I like you,” he said. “How can I court you?” “You can’t court me,” she responded. “I


have four days off a month. You’ll prob- ably never see me again.”


And as she slipped off to the bathroom, Thomas resolved not to let that happen. Then she failed to


also lived, Thomas agreed. Again they hit it off, and Thomas explained her long ab- sence. By the time they had their first solo date, eight days after they met, he found himself telling her, “You’re the one. You’re it.”


“She’s totally different than anyone I’d


ever dated before. Just in a carefree kind of way,” he says. “I always say she’s like Freddie on ‘A Different World.’ She’s all over the place. She’s always like, ‘Let’s go here, let’s do that!’ ” For the next month, anytime she wasn’t


return. “Five min- utes, 10 minutes, 15, 20, 25,” he recalls. “Thirty, 35, 40, 45. The bartender comes to me and says, ‘Damn, dog, I thought you were do- ing really well.’ I was like, ‘I thought I was too!’ ” Thomas assumed she’d slipped out the


“Now we’re actually gonna be together”


Jocelyn Hines & Jason Thomas


back. In truth, Hines had worked a 30- hour shift the day before and had cock- tails in the afternoon. When she sat down on a couch in the bathroom, she fell asleep with her head on her hands. Her sister woke her, but Hines refused to believe she’d been gone more than five minutes. She returned as the guys were paying the check and didn’t notice Thomas’s annoy- ance. The guys drove back to Baltimore,


Thomas thinking the whole way about how he’d blown it with two women. And the woman from North Carolina did make a hasty exit the next day. But when his friend proposed another double date, this time in Baltimore, where Hines


working, they were together. By February, he had signed with Miami and was sched- uled to play in the NFL Europe during the offseason. Hines was sad, but determined to find a way to visit. It turned out that a broken tibia would send Thomas to Ala- bama instead. After surgery and rehab, he returned to Miami, and he eventually moved on to play in Buffalo, Oakland and San Jose with an arena football team. Over the next three years he would re- turn to Baltimore during breaks and vaca- tions, but there were plenty of stretches when they didn’t see each other for months. Only once did they have a “this is too much” conversation,Hines says. “And we didn’t even actually break up.” By fall 2008, when the arena league sea- son was canceled and Thomas came home to Maryland to apply to business school, Hines was ready to hit the road. Her resi-


dency completed, she’d signed on to work rotations in New Orleans and Arizona. In June 2009, she returned to Balti- more and for the first time they were in the same place for the foreseeable future. They had to learn to live together and fig- ure out what they wanted for the future. “We had to have a talk — ‘All right, are we gonna do this or are we not?’ ” she says. Pressure to marry was coming from all sides, but Hines said nothing, “because I don’t want anyone to marry me who doesn’t want to marry me.” Thomas was sure about the woman whom he considers the free-spirited Dharma to his strait- laced Greg, so on New Year’s Eve 2009, he lured her to the bar at Posh and asked if she’d be his wife. Hines — not nor- mally a crying sort — broke down in


heaving sobs. “I think it was just all of it,” she says. “Five years of, ‘Where are you?’ ‘I’m here.’ ‘I can’t get on that plane.’ ‘Let’s try this.’ ‘That doesn’t work.’ All of the dra- ma that went into this relationship. And then all of a sudden, it’s ‘Now we’re actu- ally gonna be together.’ ”


Within a month — without much input from her fiance — Hines had fully planned a destination wedding for Jamai- ca in May. Three weeks before the wedding,


Thomas realized he didn’t have a current passport. He called the passport office and was told that one could be issued in a day, if necessary. He applied for the docu- ment online, but when it hadn’t come the week before the wedding, he went to the office in person. They told him to come back the following Monday, two days be- fore he was supposed to get on the plane.


It didn’t come through Monday. Tuesday either.


“I fought like hell to get it,” he says. “And


then I’m just sitting there thinking, ‘Oh my God.’ ” He called Hines at work to tell her that he wasn’t able to get a passport. She made it through her shift before breaking down in tears. The next day, as scheduled, she got on a plane to greet their 50 guests. Thomas shut his blinds and “immediately crawled up into every alcohol bottle I can find. I can’t believe I’m missing my wedding. I’m destroyed.” The passport arrived within a week, but


it was too late. Ten days later Hines, 32, returned to Baltimore. Thomas apologized to Hines’s family and got assurances from his fiance that she still wanted to marry him. And she did, on one condition: He had to or- chestrate everything. “I can’t plan another wedding,” she said. So Thomas got his binder and his


Knot.com password and “dove into this whole wedding thing headfirst.” Within weeks, he had nailed down the basics for the Thomas-Hines Wedding, Take Two. For much of the summer he was im- mersed in tasting menus, invitation fonts and pricing haggles. “I wanted to be mar- ried. And I knew if I wanted to be married, I needed to put together this wedding,” says Thomas, now a 33-year-old MBA stu- dent.


And on July 30, as the sun descended over the Baltimore harbor, the two were married on the lawn of the Pier 5 Hotel. Their 140 guests then made their way to the 1840s Ballroom for cocktails and din- ner. A casual observer would never have known the wedding was an expedited ef- fort by a former pro football player. But Thomas appreciated it that much more, he says, “knowing all that went into it.”


mccarthye@washpost.com


NUPTIALS


Erinn Schaiberger & Ryan Colaianni


Erinn Schaiberger is a financial accountant. Ryan Colaianni is a public relations account executive. They’re 25 and live in Alexandria.


Wedding date: July 3.


Locations: Holy Trinity Catholic Church in the District and Top of the Town, Arlington.


Guests: 150.


How they met: In 2007, Ryan and Erinn, both University of Kansas seniors, were at a mutual friend’s Super Bowl party. Erinn was making fun of Ryan because he wore a Georgetown T-shirt, and the Hoyas are a KU basketball rival. The two chatted, and Ryan asked Erinn out. She wasn’t looking for a relationship, but Ryan told her to think about it and contact him in two weeks. Although Erinn thought that was weird, Ryan wasn’t put off so easily; the day after the two-week deadline, he called her because he hadn’t heard from her yet.


The proposal: Ryan took Erinn to the Washington Monument in May 2008. As he was going through security, the metal detector went off repeatedly because he had the ring box in his pocket. Ryan


STEPHEN GOSLING PHOTOGRAPHY


inconspicuously showed the guards the box, and they moved Erinn through the line so she wouldn’t see it go through the X-ray machine. After climbing to the top of the monument, as Erinn was looking out the windows toward Virginia, Ryan asked, “How would you like to live with me there forever?”


The wedding: Erinn wore a 62-year-old wedding dress that her great-grandmother made and her mom and grandmother wore. The cake was decorated to look like the Washington Monument, and reception tables were named after special places they had visited.


Honeymoon: Jamaica. — Kathleen Hom


ONLINE LOVE Blogging past the angst of online dating nobody talks about.” by Ellen McCarthy


Meredith Fineman’s online dating ad- ventures began partly out of fear of bore- dom. The 23-year-old Washington native


was returning from an exciting post- college year in Argentina to face a jobless existence under her parents’ roof. “I was afraid I’d be back here and just be miserable,” she says.


So before Fineman left Bue- nos Aires in May, she signed up for a JDate account, thinking the dating site for Jewish sin- gles would be a good distraction and a vehicle to meet new peo- ple. It was both of those things, and a wormhole into a strange sub- culture she found slightly bizarre and endlessly entertaining. Fineman e- mailed her observations to friends who forwarded them to others who had simi- lar experiences. The response was so pos- itive she set up a blog, FiftyFirst- JDates.com, to document her strange, sad and (sometimes) funny encounters with D.C.’s JDaters. “There are just so many little awkward intricacies of the site and of the way it works,” she says. Not least of which is that “it’s this thing that everybody does and


Especially among people in their early


20s, she says, online dating still carries a stigma of being the realm of the desper- ate. But once she began to talk openly about it, Fineman was surprised by how many friends admitted they’d done it, or were thinking about signing up, but scared to take the plunge. She’s hoping that by laughing at the absurdi- ties, she can help normalize it a bit.


Fineman writes only of first Fineman


dates, never with actual names and always with the guy’s per- mission. She pokes fun at some of the site’s peculiarities — canned flirtations like “Let’s atone for our sins together” or “Better call a doctor, you’ve stopped my heart” — and the


preponderance of user names such as “MotherApproved33” and “YourGrand- maWouldLoveMe.” In D.C., she says, the JDating world be- comes very small. She’s ended up having friends in common with several of the 13 men she’s gone out with since late May. More unnerving is the experience of see- ing someone in the real world whose face she recognizes from their online profile. On a recent night out with friends, she


spotted a fellow JDater who was clearly on a first date. “And he looks at me and he knows and I know . . . and we’re both just


glancing back,” she says. But the guy’s date at least appeared to be going well. “She seemed into it. He seemed into it — you could tell from the body language.” Fineman’s decided on some JDating guidelines: Not too much e-mail buildup (“if you establish a rapport online, that doesn’t always translate in person”). Drinks are better than coffee (here she quotes Bravo’s “Millionaire Matchmaker” Patti Stanger — “Coffee is cheap, lunch is an interview, drinks are an audition, din- ner is romance”). Err on the side of giving people a chance, and keep your expecta- tions as low as possible. “The dates I went into with the least expectations are the ones I liked the most,” she says. Of course, the blog has made dating


even weirder than it was to begin with. She usually tells guys about it after their first date. But since it’s gained some trac- tion — Huffington Post picks up many of her posts — some men know about it be- fore they know her. One recently con- fessed that he was waiting for her to men- tion it. (Luckily he was a fan of her work.) “It’s created an interesting dilemma


for me,” she says. “Yes, I want to be an en- tertaining writer, but I also joined this site for a reason.” As for whether Fineman will make it to


50 dates, time will tell. “That’s a lot of dates,” she admits. But if she doesn’t, that might mean the site can claim success. mccarthye@washpost.com


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