Whitney Montgomery at first refused Lennie Breland’s invitation for a midweek first date. But he persisted.
Getting out of work early enough for a midweek date was almost impossible for Whitney Montgomery when she met Lennie Breland on the dating app Black People Meet in October 2013. So when Mr. Breland asked her for a first date on a Wednesday, she suggested a different day. But he was pretty insistent about Wednesday.
“I get paid on Wednesdays,” said Mr. Breland, 41, a court officer at Brooklyn Criminal Court. “I wanted to be able to buy out the bar if need be.”
His exchange with Ms. Montgomery, 38, then a junior associate at the law firm Morgan Lewis and now a transactional lawyer at Bloomberg, had made him feel hopeful after some family hectoring about his track record with women. “My aunt was like, ‘You’ve got to get moving and find a real girlfriend,’” he said.
With Ms. Montgomery, the first woman he met on the app, “it seemed like we really connected.” She thought so, too. But when they met for dinner at Milk River in Brooklyn on Oct. 23, 2013, each took a moment to recalibrate.
Mr. Breland, who had splurged on a fresh pair of thick-heeled Timberland boots for the occasion, didn’t expect to be shorter than Ms. Montgomery. “Whitney had told me she was kind of tall, like 5-foot-10,” he said. Instead, she was closer to 6-foot-1. (“I like to round down,” she said.) That was OK with him.
But Ms. Montgomery wasn’t sure she was OK with a joke Mr. Breland made during dinner about her inability to stop staring at her Blackberry. “I told her at my job, we have this game where whoever touches their phone first has to pay for the meal,” he said.
Mr. Breland wasn’t serious, but she thought he was. “I’m thinking, he’s making me feel like I’m not making a good impression,” she recalled. For a minute, she regretted concocting a lie about needing to leave work early to meet a plumber so that she could meet Mr. Breland on a Wednesday.
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
By the time they left the restaurant, though, any reservations had been swept aside.
“I was very attracted to her,” he said, and vice versa. That weekend, he invited her to a friend’s barbecue. The next day, they went running in Prospect Park. By Thanksgiving, she found out they were an official couple when they ran into one of Mr. Breland’s co-workers at a movie theater in Queens.
The co-worker introduced Mr. Breland to his wife. “And then Lennie said, ‘This is my girlfriend, Whitney,’” said Ms. Montgomery, who had been hoping he thought of her that way. Later, she asked if he meant it. He did. “By then we were spending so much time together, I just figured,” he said.
In 2018, Mr. Breland moved from Flatbush, Brooklyn into Ms. Montgomery’s apartment in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. Around the same time, Ms. Montgomery entered the “E zone.”
“I was going around telling everybody, ‘OK, I made it to the E zone, which is like the end zone in football when you’re 10 yards from the goal line,” she said. Instead of a touchdown, though, she wanted an engagement ring.
On July 16, 2019, on a vacation to Las Vegas, she got one. Close to midnight, Mr. Breland dropped to one knee by a courtyard fountain outside the Caesar’s Palace hotel and proposed. Ms. Montgomery was too excited to cry. So he, uncharacteristically, shed tears for her.
In the summer of 2020, they canceled their planned January 2021 wedding because of Covid. Ms. Montgomery, who is eager to start a family, was devastated. “Last year was so hard,” she said.
But their rescheduled wedding, on Oct. 8 at 501 Union, an events space in Brooklyn, made up for it all. As the Rev. Tina Baker of Bethlehem Baptist Church pronounced them married, 108 guests, some of whom were vaccinated just to attend, watched them jump a broom into a new life.
“We wanted to carry on that tradition as a reminder to our families that it’s a way to sweep away bad things,” Ms. Montgomery said. “We’re so happy to be making the leap into a new chapter.”
"time" - Google News
November 05, 2021 at 04:00PM
https://ift.tt/3q8YXSf
Making Time to Connect on a Wednesday - The New York Times
"time" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3f5iuuC
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Making Time to Connect on a Wednesday - The New York Times"
Post a Comment