While the photos Alejandro José Rojas had uploaded to the dating app Bumble caught Jaclyn Ariel Belson’s eye when she saw his profile in June 2021, it was the captions Mr. Rojas had written for the images that really stood out to her.
One photo showed him lying on the floor of the Edge, a glass observation deck 100 stories above Manhattan’s Hudson Yards. Its caption read, “Looks like I am falling. Is it for you?”
Mr. Rojas said the app’s caption fields give “you more room to express yourself,” adding, “I was trying to be funny.” He succeeded with Ms. Belson, who swiped right on his profile. Upon seeing her profile, Mr. Rojas, who said he was instantly taken by Ms. Belson’s blue eyes, swiped right, too.
A day after they matched on Bumble that June, the two had their first date. They started out at Bar Jamón, a Spanish wine bar and restaurant near Manhattan’s Union Square, then went “from tapas to another bar to another bar,” Mr. Rojas said. “On every corner we kissed.”
The next day, he was still happily thinking about the previous night. After leaving a 7 a.m. tennis lesson in Central Park, “it was like I could hear the birds singing,” Mr. Rojas said. Before long, he and Ms. Belson had started to communicate daily.
The two say their immediate chemistry was not a given because of their different upbringings. From the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Ms. Belson, 43, is Jewish, while Mr. Rojas, 47, a native of Caracas, Venezuela, is Catholic. But early on, they bonded over the fact that both had experienced challenges growing up.
Ms. Belson’s father died when she was 6 and her mother when she was 18. Mr. Rojas, born with a cleft palate, underwent numerous surgeries as a child.
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
A graduate of the University of Michigan, Ms. Belson, who holds a law degree from St. John’s University, is an investigative counsel for the New York State Inspector General’s Office. Mr. Rojas graduated from Duke before earning an M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a master’s degree in information and data science from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the vice president for applied analytics in the New York City office of Parrot Analytics, a data science company in Los Angeles.
Though Ms. Belson said that “from the beginning, we just liked each other,” she knew Mr. Rojas was the one before he felt that way about her. “It was just a feeling like, ‘This is my guy,’” she said, describing Mr. Rojas as someone who “always lives in a state of hope.”
“He enjoys every moment,” she added. “Everything feels joyful.”
Mr. Rojas cited Ms. Belson’s displays of thoughtfulness as a reason he fell in love with her. In August 2021, to celebrate his birthday, “she prepared an itinerary of events,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is a person who really cares.’”
On Dec. 23, 2021, just six months after they met, he proposed at South Pointe Park in Miami, while they were on vacation with some of his family. For his proposal, Mr. Rojas again showcased his creativity with words by making an acrostic for Ms. Belson, with certain letters spelling out, “Jackie marry me.”
He also presented her with a rose gold band containing 17 diamonds. The amount of stones, Mr. Rojas said, is “a prime number, to symbolize that our love can never be divided from this moment on.”
In front of 105 guests, all of whom were asked to take Covid tests, the couple were wed June 9 at Kanopi, a rooftop events space at The Opus, Westchester hotel, in White Plains, N.Y. The ceremony, which included readings and blessings in Hebrew, Spanish and English, was led by Rabbi Allen Block of Westbury, N.Y., and Msgr. Jim Lisante of Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic church in Massapequa Park, N.Y., who solemnized the marriage.
“They are best buds,” Ms. Belson said of their Jewish and Catholic officiants. “They’ve been doing it forever.”
A reception that followed also celebrated the newlyweds’ different backgrounds with a menu that included sweet potato latkes, as well as arepas and tequeños. Nodding to the way they met, the couple offered a specialty drink called “the Bumble,” a classic margarita, and stocked the bathrooms with paper hand towels that read, “We swiped right.”
The post Winning Her Heart Through His Way With Words appeared first on New York Times.
