Nora Patrice O’Neill and Gabriel Grand had only been dating a couple of months when her twin brother, Patrick, posed a jaw-dropping question.
“Gabe, when are you going to marry my sister?” he asked over dinner with Ms. O’Neill’s parents in November 2014 at a now-closed French restaurant during Harvard’s freshman family weekend.
After a very awkward moment, everyone laughed.
Mr. Grand and Ms. O’Neill, now 28, first met in a dining hall soon after arriving on the campus as freshmen at Harvard that September. A week later, he sat next to her in their history of neuroscience seminar.
“I’m interested in brains and cognition and she in the history of science,” he said.
Mr. Grand, who grew up in Pelham, N.Y., graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Harvard. He is now pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science focusing on language and cognition at the computer science and A.I. lab at M.I.T.
“We kept running into each other, and after the fourth time, we exchanged numbers,” Ms. O’Neill said. They both lived in Wigglesworth Hall, which has separate entryways but is connected by a basement and a laundry room.
Ms. O’Neill, who is from Washington, D.C., graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in history and science. She is now pursuing a medical degree and doctorate at Yale in the history of science and medicine.
“I definitely had a crush on her,” Mr. Grand said. “I was trying to play things a little cool.”
One Friday, after they ended up at the same party, they headed to the Tasty Burger in Harvard Square after midnight where they shared fries, and a first kiss. “It was very unofficially our first date,” he said.
The next morning he asked her on a real one. They dined at the now-closed Boathouse in Cambridge that evening, where they drew pictures illustrating their lives with crayons on a paper tablecloth, including characters they loved from “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
“I started to fall in love with her,” Mr. Grand said.
As family weekend rolled around in November, Ms. O’Neill was eager for him to meet her twin brother, Patrick, who has intellectual disabilities and “means the world to me,” she said.
“He is somebody so full of joy,” Mr. Grand said.
The couple continued to get serious after the family dinner in November, and mostly hung out studying together, unwinding with “Game of Thrones.”
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That summer, after his cognitive neuroscience program ended in Trento, Italy, they met in Florence, where he led her on a scavenger hunt of local sites with clues he handed her on postcards.
Over dinner at a trattoria, he gave her gold earrings etched with a fleur-de-lis that he had bought a month earlier along the Ponte Vecchio. (She wore them at their wedding).
In April 2017, the spring semester of junior year, they broke up. “We realized our relationship had become serious,” he said. “We were both doing some soul-searching.”
After nine months apart, however, they realized they wanted to be together, and began quietly dating again.
In 2019, while they were both working, they moved into a four-bedroom apartment in Cambridge with three other classmates.
Once Covid hit, they moved out and worked remotely from his parents’ house on Shelter Island, N.Y., and usually had lunch with his paternal grandmother across the road. Ms. O’Neill made a cinnamon crumb coffee cake for her birthday. (His mother Laurie Goodstein is a deputy editor on the international desk at The New York Times.)
Over the last four years, during their New Haven-Boston relationship, they saw each other most weekends as they pursued their doctoral degrees. She plans to join him in Cambridge in August.
On Oct. 15, 2022, on an overlook along a secluded trail near Mount Holyoke, Mass., he got down on one knee on golden leaves carpeting the ground.
“Finally,” her twin brother said when he heard the news of their engagement.
On May 11, Molly and Dolly, two draft horses, stood in a field, as Rabbi Morris Barzilai, the groom’s bar mitzvah rabbi, officiated in an open-sided pavilion before 161 guests at Valley View Farm in Haydenville, Mass. (The night before, the couple and members of the wedding party, who stayed at the farm, watched the Aurora Borealis lights, monitored by a friend on the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD.)
At the ceremony, the couple stepped on a glass and recited the seven blessings based on Jewish tradition, then added an eighth blessing — an Irish one, “May the Road Rise to Meet You,” recorded by her 97-year-old maternal grandfather for the occasion.
During the cocktail hour, the groom played guitar and sang his favorite Spanish love ballad “Tuyo” by Rodrigo Amarante, and crooned Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon.”
Later, in the barn, the bride and her mother danced an Irish Swallowtail jig followed by a hora, both accompanied by a fiddler. The couple’s first dance was to “First Try” by Johnnyswim.
“We stuck together,” Ms. O’Neill said of the relationship. ”And got it right on the first try.”
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