When love is not madness, it is not love

On December 17, 2020, we "legally" tied the knot via civil ceremony, just a couple weeks after making the difficult decision to postpone our religious ceremony and rception. We refused, however, to let 2020 win and proceeded to coordinate a civil ceremony with Pastor April Gismondi and just our parents and siblings. It was scheduled for December 17, 2020 at 12:00pm (the day before we left for a two week trip to the Dominican Republic) at the Gazeboin East Northport.  On December 16th, we went to our family homes and prayed the 2020 blizzard was a hoax ...it wasn't. December 17th, Erin woke up late to a dead phone and a few missed calls from Pastor April. She was so sweet and so patient with the several insane plans we tried to make work with the snow storm - including shoveling her out of her home and picking her up in mom's pickup truck. Once we realized the gazebo was likely way more snowed in than any of us, we poured mimosa's, agreed to a ZOOM wedding in the Gress Family living room, and waited for the Chimarios family to shovel themselves out and make it to Stony Brook safely!   It was my favorite Hallmark Christmas moment. Our families went above and beyond to make it extra special for us and while so many special people were missing, we had the opportunity to start this chapter of our lives already conquering a major obstacle, together as one. And now we wait patiently until the day we can take this joy and bliss and let it overflow in celebration with our amazing friends and family we have so desperately missed over this last year.   To view some memories from our civil ceremony, visit the "Photos - The Prologue" section of our website. We cannot wait to make even more memories and become one under the eyes of God with all of you this Spring!

It was Tommy’s 29th birthday, and my second day at a new job. About two weeks before, he started pressuring me to reach out to my new boss and make sure I’ll be able to leave by 5:00 for his birthday dinner. Super uncomfortable, but I did. Tommy was off that day (he took off to spend the day with his family for his birthday) and was going to meet me at work at 5:30pm so we could head to dinner together. I texted him towards the end of the day and told him I might be 15-20 minutes late because we still had patients in the office. He was not okay with this and started pulling the “birthday card”. Naturally, we didn’t agree about his 29th birthday overruling my first impression in a new career. I decided to put my phone away for the remainder of the day and promptly enter full brat-mode. When work was over, he met me outside and said his family was waiting in Central Park where they had been spending the day. Looking back, I can see how obvious it all should have been but I was so mad at him the entire walk over that it ended up helping the surprise factor. After what seemed like a hundred steps, we arrived at a beautiful outdoor gazebo at the top of a hill in Central Park (near east 65th street) where there were rose petals and our family members hiding (I still don’t understand where they could have possibly been/how I didn’t see them). He finally proposed - after 10 years of dating and about 4 years of talking about it - and I FORGOT TO SAY YES. His birthday dinner turned into our engagement dinner with both of our families and it was the best day of of our lives so far - until December 18, 2020.

We met at Hempstead’s most exclusive night life scene of 2009 - Hofstra’s Greek Night at the Dizzy Lizard’s Saloon. For both of us, it was one of the first “bar nights” we went to since just having pledged Alpha Phi sorority and Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity for weeks. We never spoke a single word to each other until about an hour into that night when I walked up to him in his prescription aviatora and said “So you’re Tommy Shades?”. I had to do a little convincing to make him mine, but my heart became his forever that night. I didn’t even stand a chance.