🕔 5pm

Our first casual meeting was at a big group event (Pearly's friend Jane's birthday/pool party at her house in Long Island), she did notice that Scott was pretty cute but assumed he was in a relationship with someone else at the party. Turns out this was not the case but the other friend was there with her boyfriend, but Scott didn't know too many people at the party (and had not been in NY/US for very long yet at the point) and so was sticking close to our most social friend of the group. Pearly also thought he was cute in a nerdy kind of way because he was participating in a very long game of Settlers of Catan during the party. At the time, Pearly was just starting to get used to using the dating apps that were becoming popular. Like a lot of people, she did find going on multiple first dates pretty tedious and routine (aka you talk about the same topics over and over again) and it felt like going to job interviews. Pearly mentioned this to her good friend from college Jane (Same Jane from the BBQ pool party) and she said she had a friend who was single and was also interested in having more of a human connection that we weren't getting from the dating apps. Our mutual friends Jane and Ji set us up on a group hangout for oysters happy hour (we are both big foodies) to see if we connected before we can decide to initiate a first date. The oysters HH/hangout went well and we spent a lot of time talking about our love of music and attending music festivals/concerts (we both attended the second annual Gov Ball on Randalls Island and shared our battle stories of attending an outdoor music festival in a rainstorm). We talked back and forth over the next few weeks online and planned to go to a Canadian indie band perform in Williamsburg. Unfortunately Pearly ended up catching a pretty bad cold that week and had to cancel our first date. Our online communication somewhat dwindled to nonexistent after that (Scott insists to this day that I intentionally canceled on him because I got cold feet and not an actual cold). A few months later, October rolls around and it was Halloween. Halloween is probably one of Pearly's favorite holidays and she loves most things associated with horror. Going to haunted houses and watching horror movies are some of her favorite pasttimes. She usually does these activities solo since most of her friends (and all of my exes) do not share my love of all things horror. Coincidentally she was in the Lower East Side on Halloween night after having dinner/drinks in full costume (I went as the Black Swan) with my cousins but they called it an early night. There was a well-known haunted house production that was put on by an actors troupe in proximity and she decided to wait in line for entry. While waiting, she remembered that Scott lived in the LES area and she still had his contact in her phone. She decided to send him a msg to see if he was free that evening and interested in joining me at the haunted house. He said he was and came to join me in line in 15 minutes or so. He complimented my costume and we talked about the Black Swan movie and horror movies in general. We had a great time at the haunted house (at one point Scott was 'captured' by one of the ghouls and another customer asked me if that was 'my man' and I said oh uh this is only our first date'. Flash forward to 9 years/Halloweeniversaries later, we now have many haunted house visits and horror movies and film festivals, couples costumes, etc. under our belt :).

Besides Halloween/horror/spooky things, we also share a passion for food and some of our favorite activities includes food/eating. Therefore, our wedding is being held at Rule of Thirds restaurant, and not a traditional wedding venue. Trying new restaurants is something we both enjoy and we have also planned trips around food (e.g. Portland, Oregon for their famous food trucks). We also generally treat each other to nice restaurant meals for occasions like birthdays, anniversaries and Valentine's Day instead of material gifts. Omakase dinner for two is usually our go-to. As mentioned, we also both enjoy traveling a lot, we did try to plan at least 3-4 trips every year pre-pandemic, and things have slowed down a bit since then and also because we purchased a fixer-upper home two years ago and moved in a year ago. But one of our most memorable trips was a month-long stay in Korea (for a friends' wedding) and Japan in 2017. Japanese food is one of our favorite cuisines so the Japan trip was especially significant. Also we were lucky enough to experience the famous Tsukiji Fish Market before it relocated to its new location (that no longer allows specatator to its tuna auctions). Our most recent big international trip was to Iceland in November 2022 for two weeks where we got to embrace out love of the hiking/outdoors. We saw many wonderous waterfalls and even got to witness the Northern Lights during our trip!