Andrew Warren Tolman relaxes on a lounge chair next to Jenna Lynn Santoro on July 20, 2019, while wrapping up the weekly Saturday beach club party at Gurney's Montauk Resort in Montauk, New York.
“Eating, drinking, running to the ocean, it was a perfect day,” said Tolman, who had met her briefly earlier that afternoon.
Tolman, 33, now vice president of the capital markets group in New York at Houlihan Lokey, an investment bank, graduated with a bachelor's degree in political science from Amherst College.
The two of them, exhausted, chatted over rosé wine as they gazed out at the ocean and people-watched for the next hour. They also exchanged numbers. Shortly before dinner time, via text message, he invited her to join him and her friends at Ruschmeyer's, a restaurant and bar, that night for drinks, which coincided with her dinner.
“I was focused on having fun with my friends,” said Santoro, 30, “and I didn't want to get my hopes up.”
Ms. Santoro, now a development associate focusing on the Willets Point, Queens, affordable housing project at Related Companies, graduated with a bachelor's degree in art history from Johns Hopkins and received a master's degree in real estate development from Columbia.
After dinner, she and a friend walked in and out of Ruschmeyer's. The next morning, she and another friend spent a few hours with Mr. Tolman at Kirk Park Beach, where he and Ms. Santoro tentatively agreed to take the same train back to Manhattan that same afternoon.
“I was definitely intrigued,” said Santoro, who shared a summer in Montauk while Tolman stayed with friends that weekend.
Later, his friends criticized him on the train for not only getting up to sit next to Mrs. Santoro, but also for spending so much time with her that weekend.
“I'm going to marry this girl, so be patient,” he recalled telling them. “It was my way of saying this is different.”
During the three-hour trip they talked while drinking rosé wine that she had on hand.
“How do I make sure this weekend doesn't end?” She remembered thinking as they approached Penn Station.
On the platform he suggested they have dinner at Rossopomodoro, a now-closed Italian restaurant in the West Village, across the street from where he lived at the time.
“What's going on here?” she remembered thinking, but “I went with the flow.”
After getting into a taxi, he carried her bags to his study while she waited in the lobby before dinner. As they sat at the restaurant's bar, they enjoyed vodka rigatoni and red wine until the place closed, and ended the evening with a kiss goodnight before taking an Uber back to Gramercy Park.
“It was a whirlwind few weeks,” he said, as they saw each other two or three times a week. In August, she visited her in Montauk, where they went to the Surf Lodge to see her favorite band, Rüfüs Du Sol, an Australian house and techno group.
During the fall they took spin classes together and she cooked hearty Italian meals at home, including fried meatballs with her great-aunt's bolognese sauce recipe.
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“Always with a good wine,” he said. “My dad taught me about wine.”
In December, they swam, ran and played golf while visiting their parents at their vacation home in West Palm Beach, Florida.
In March, after Covid hit New York, their studio apartments started coming their way. So they temporarily moved into his parents' apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side while they were away.
“We went from the mentality of being single to actually being together,” he said, and that summer they rented a car and stayed in simple hotels in the North and South Forks of Long Island.
In March 2021, they moved into a one-bedroom apartment in the West Village together.
“It was clear that he was going to propose to me,” said Santoro, who was waiting for the moment during a trip to Puglia, Italy, in July 2022. “Aren't you going to propose to me on this trip?” he said, adding with a smile. “I'm always direct.”
But Tolman waited until February 2023. While visiting his parents in Florida, he insisted they take a morning walk on the beach at Singer Island after he uncharacteristically vetoed his suggestions to go for a run or play tennis. So, reluctantly, he put on the bathing suit and the black bucket hat. After walking for 15 minutes, he knelt in the sand. “Yes,” he said without hesitation.
The couple married Dec. 31 at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Cantor Lisa V. Segal officiated at a gala ceremony, before 175 guests, who dressed in white or black or a combination of both. David Monn, an event planner for whom the bride's mother works, decorated it in the New Year's spirit with gold, silver and pops of champagne pink, the color of the bride's Naeem Khan dress.
The couple’s first dance, a slower, softer version of Rüfüs Du Sol’s “Treat You Better,” was a nod to their early summer days in Montauk, as well as their honeymoon on the beaches of Australia and New Zealand. .
“We are having as much fun as we did the first time we met at the beach,” Tolman said during their trip. And he added: “We're in the middle of summer right now.”
