E14 OnLove NUPTIALS JAY PREMACK
Emily Anthony & Darren Flusche
Emily Anthony is a research scientist at the Department of Education. Darren Flusche is a policy analyst for a bicycling advocacy group. They are 31 and live in the District.
Wedding Date: Aug. 14. Location: Raspberry Plain, Leesburg. Guests: 150.
How they met: While graduate students at New York University, Darren and Emily found themselves sitting across the room from each other in their Regression Analysis class. After getting to know each other during the school year, their crushes turned into a relationship after a long talk at a Super Tuesday viewing party in 2008.
The proposal: The couple relocated to the District after graduation, and in December Darren started trying to plan a special night to propose. Emily, unaware of Darren’s intentions, shot down all of his dinner suggestions. So he changed tactics and persuaded Emily to go on a walk with him to the nearby National Zoo, where he asked her to marry him in front of the Great Ape House.
The wedding: The couple wanted their ceremony to be intimate and personal, so they included plenty of loved ones in honored roles: Darren’s father wrote and officiated the marriage ceremony, five children were involved in the processional, and the bride and groom were joined by a bridal party totaling 20.
The honeymoon: Emily and Darren spent two weeks unwinding in Aruba, where they took windsurfing lessons, sailed, snorkeled and hiked.
— Michelle Thomas
KLMNO
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SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2010
WHAT YOU’LL FIND ONLINE • Our OnLove questionnaire, which couples can fill out to be considered for coverage. • Videos, photos, advice and polls.
MARK GAIL/THE WASHINGTON POST EVERYONE’S A COMEDIAN: Allyson Jaffe and Chris White’s reception showed off their funny bones. She’s a part-owner of the DC Improv; he’s a stand-up comic. by Ellen McCarthy In September 2005, comedian Chris
White attended his friend Allyson Jaffe’s wedding with the long-term girlfriend he thought he would marry. But a few months later, after 41
⁄2 years
of dating, they broke up. In his stand-up routine, he compares the experience to being 25 feet away from finish line of a marathon when a lion jumps out and bites your leg off as the official tells you to crawl back to the starting line and begin anew race — “a race with only other crip- pled people. And the name of this race is: ‘Your 30s.’ ”
White, now 33, is playing it up for laughs, of course, but the devastation wasn’t minor. Jaffe, manager of the DC Improv, was among those he relied on most for support. They’d met three years earlier at an open mike competition at the Improv where they both lost to — if White recalls correctly — “a pot-smoking student at American University.” After that, they saw each other reg-
REBECCA D’ANGELO PHOTOGRAPHY Emma Patti &
Anthony Harris Emma Patti is an assistant photo editor. Anthony Harris is a photographer. They are 23 and live in Fairfax.
Wedding date: Aug. 14.
Location: Basilica of St. Lawrence and On Broadway, Asheville, N.C. Guests: 125.
How they met: As photojournalism majors at the University of North Carolina, Emma and Anthony were both shooting a campus Sept. 11 tribute for a class assignment when they began chatting about their equipment. It wasn’t exactly love at first sight: “I thought Anthony was the biggest jerk on Earth,” says Emma. But she warmed up to him when they began working together at the student newspaper.
The proposal: After just four months of dating, Anthony came home late one evening after work to find Emma asleep. He placed a white rose on her pillow, woke her up and then asked her to marry him.
The wedding: The couple incorporated their mutual love of photography throughout the reception, including a reception “gallery” in which they displayed some of their favorite work, and a 3-D groom’s cake in the shape of their favorite film camera. Emma and Anthony’s band surprised them by playing a rendition of Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” to close the evening.
The honeymoon: A visit to Kauai, Hawaii, where the newlyweds took a catamaran tour along the Hawaiian coast, snorkeled and explored the island in a soft-top Jeep.
— Michelle Thomas
ularly at comedy events and became part of the same close-knit group of friends. In time, Jaffe abandoned her stand-up dreams to focus on management — the 32-year-old is now a part-owner of the Improv — while White redoubled his ef- forts to make a career out of comedy. When he quit his copy-editing job to pursue stand-up full time in 2005, Jaffe cheered him on. “I always liked what Chris did, so I tried to help him — putting together packages, mailing them to management companies and just being an ear,” she says. “The fact that Chris gave it a shot and tried is so admirable.” And he succeeded enough to pay most of his bills with comedy, traveling the country for gigs and sleeping in hotel rooms as often as not. But he remained devoted to D.C. and his friends here. In early 2007, when Jaffe told White that her marriage was crumbling, he rushed back to the city to sit beside her. Talking about the sense of betrayal
they now shared, “I just lost it and cried,” she says. Over the next few months, as Jaffe separated from her husband and tried to re-imagine a future for herself, she turned again and again to White, who by then had a new girlfriend. “He was amazing and just kind of got me through it.”
When his relationship ended a few months later, more than one mutual friend asked White if he would finally
‘Everything he does makes me feel special’
Chris White & Allyson Jaffe
nothing weird about it,” she says. “I want- ed to be near him and I wanted to be with him even more than I was before.” They already knew each other’s quirks and moods and secrets. The unveiling that usually takes months or years had been done long ago. “We have such a good understanding of each other’s per- sonalities,” he says. “You know when it’s time to try to talk or to help them, and you also know when it’s time to shut up and go play your video games while they work something out.” That November, while on tour in
Washington state, White decided to climb Mount St. Helens during a free af- ternoon. He’d been thinking a lot about Jaffe during their days apart and realized that he hoped to marry her. But he didn’t want to rush things. At the top of the mountain, he pulled out his video cam- era and recorded a proposal. It sat stored on his computer for the
next 12 months. On Nov. 15, 2009, they had dinner at Georgia Brown’s and re- turned to her apartment, where he said, “You don’t know it, but this is a one-year anniversary for us.” He told her the story and hit “play” on the proposal he’d been waiting to offer her. “The thought of someone thinking
MARK GAIL/THE WASHINGTON POST
FRIENDS FIRST: White attended Jaffe’s first marriage in 2005 and then helped her through a divorce; Jaffe encouraged White to pursue his dream.
start dating Jaffe. They made each other laugh and were constantly heading off on adventures together, to Coney Island for a hot dog-eating contest, or to watch Punxsutawney Phil emerge from his hole in Pennsylvania on Groundhog Day. Even White’s mom suggested it, he recalls, say- ing: “You guys hang out all the time. You seem like a really good match.” His response: “No, we’re just friends.
That doesn’t make sense.” But something was building. There were long, silent pauses and moments when it seemed they were looking at each other in a new way. “It was like, ‘Should I kiss you? What’s
going on?’ ” she says. “We have such a great thing right now. And this could ruin it. Or this could work.”
Just before Christmas that year, they had lunch and went back to his Capitol Hill apartment to talk. “What are we go- ing to do about this?” he asked. She replied with a slightly cruder ver- sion of the phrase “to hell with it” and kissed him. He kissed her back and then left for a week, visiting his parents in Philadel- phia. It was just enough time for her to get nervous about how things would work between them and how much they were putting at risk.
“I said, ‘I think as well as we know each
other, it’s worth a shot. Why don’t we go for it and see what happens?’ ” he says. And when he returned for New Year’s
Eve, they shifted into a relationship that felt surprisingly natural. “There was
that a year ago and then showing it to you — there are no words for that,” she says. “Everything he does makes me feel special.” The two were married Aug. 28 before 130 friends and relatives at the Old Eb- bitt Grill. Their buddy, comedian Jared Stern, presided over a ceremony they wrote themselves. A week before the wedding, as they contemplated contingencies needed to help guests navigate around the crowds expected at a Glenn Beck rally, Jaffe thought back to her first trip down the aisle. “Round one, I was nervous. I’m not nervous with this one,” she says. “I think it’s supposed to be this. All this stuff that we went through and that I went through — I’m happy I went through that to be here with Chris.” Now standing at the end of his dating
marathon, White is sure that what first connected him and Jaffe will also sustain them in the miles they’ll walk together. “If you have that sense of humor, it’s not just a shared quality; it’s a tool you use to get through a lot of things in life,” he says. “When she’s had hard times and when I’ve had hard times, we’ve always been able to be there for each other and make each other laugh.”
mccarthye@washpost.com
THE LITERATURE Engineer or dancer? Occupation might affect divorce chances. by Ellen McCarthy
If you marry the charming dancer who asks for your hand, are you more likely to wind up in divorce court than if you’d picked the sensible engineer? That seems to be the suggestion of a re- cent study that explores the correlation of various occupations and rates of separa- tion and divorce — raising questions about the way our careers can impact our personal lives. The study, published in the spring edi- tion of the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, was co-writtenby Michael Aa- modt, a professor emeritus at Radford University who now works as a consultant with the Washington-based DCI Consult- ing Group. At first, Aamodt wasn’t interested in the romantic lives of either dancers or engi- neers. Much of his academic career has been spent researching the personalities of law enforcement officers. In previous
studies Aamodt debunked a myth about higher-than-average suicide rates among police officers and showed that most cops have personality traits similar to those of other Americans. Turning to their domestic lives, how-
ever, he found statistics about divorce rates based on occupation hard to come by. Student Shawn P. McCoy, co-author of the study, pressed Census officials to pro- vide data that could be parsed to reveal di- vorce and separation rates for Americans working in 449 jobs.
At the time of the 2000 Census, 16.35 percent of Americans who had previously been married listed themselves as di- vorced or separated. Only 14.5 percent of law enforcement of-
ficers who had been married said the same. (The rates varied widely across the profession, though: Just 12.5 percent of de- tectives were divorced, but 25.5 percent of fish and game wardens had broken up with a spouse.)
Dancers and choreographers registered
the highest divorce rates (43.1 percent), followed by bartenders (38.4 percent) and massage therapists (38.2 percent). Also in the top 10 were casino workers, telephone operators, nurses and home health aides. Three types of engineers — agricultural, sales and nuclear engineers — were repre- sented among the 10 occupations with the lowest divorce rates. Also reporting low marital breakup rates were optometrists (4 percent), clergy (5.6 percent) and podia- trists (6.8 percent). The numbers don’t paint a complete
picture. If a person had divorced and re- married by the time of the Census, they would be counted as married. So it could be the case that people in some occupa- tions are just quicker to jump into the next marriage than others. The authors also point out that the data
don’t reveal whether it’s the nature of the jobs that lead to divorce, or if people prone to unstable relationships are drawn to cer- tain professions. Terri Orbuch, a sociologist and director
of a long-term study on marriage funded by the National Institutes of Health, thinks that our working lives can directly affect our home lives.
“One of the things I found is that job stress spills over into our relationships. It can be not getting along with our col- leagues or our boss . . . or the actual amount of time that we need to spend at work or doing work at home that spills over and affects our marriages negatively,” says Orbuch, author of “5 Simple Steps to Take Your Marriage From Good to Great.” Aamodt knows his study raises more questions than it answers. Chief among them: Why? “Why are bartenders this way and engi- neers that way? Unfortunately we just don’t know,” he says, before adding that several of his graduate students are look- ing into it.
But for now, perhaps this is reason enough to give that engineer a second glance.
mccarthye@washpost.com
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