Kelly Alise Lyles sipped Champagne while chatting with Ronald Bernardus Cornelis Franciscus Verstappen on the phone for the first time in December 2022. He had a glass in hand, too.
“It was a fun coincidence,” said Mr. Verstappen, 56, who met her through the Bumble dating app. He was in Hawaii; she in Miami.
Ms. Lyles said her friends call her “the Champagne girl.” “I’ve had Champagne Sundays, Champagne Saturdays and Champagne parties. It’s just a little excitement on your tongue. It’s a celebration.”
During that initial phone call, she asked him where in Miami he lived — he had unwittingly set his Bumble to Miami as his permanent location, not as his vacation location for his upcoming 10-day trip. When he answered “Kauai,” he lost some fizz. She put him in her “practice date” category.
Ms. Lyles, 47, had been one of eight dates he had lined up for a boys’ trip over Christmas 2022. He had ended an engagement four months earlier, and his previous marriage ended in divorce.
Ms. Lyles, who grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and has two grown sons, is a broker at Kelly Lyles International Realty in Miami, and in August is starting Chef2Nite, a booking platform connecting people to private chefs. She studied fashion design at the now-closed International Fine Arts College in Miami.
In 2008, Mr. Verstappen, born in Nijmegen, Netherlands, and raised in parts of New Zealand and Adelaide, Australia, retired at age 39 after he sold Wombat Financial Software, his fintech company, to N.Y.S.E. Euronext. He now invests in areas like movie production, and marijuana cultivation and production companies. He also runs the Verstappen Family Foundation, which mainly supports underprivileged and underserved youth.
He graduated with a Bachelor of Science honors degree in computer science from the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Like her, Mr. Verstappen loves Formula One racing, travel, Japanese food and, of course, Champagne.
When they met at Zuma, a Japanese restaurant, a few hours after his plane landed in Miami, “we gave each other a warm hug,” he said. “Everything went swimmingly.”
After two hours at the restaurant, he went with her to the Living Room at the Faena Hotel Miami Beach where she met a few friends. They danced to live disco music and then went to two other clubs, with a parting kiss at 5 a.m.
At 5 p.m., she met him at the beachfront grill at the Setai hotel in Miami Beach, where he had lunch with friends earlier. He called off his next two dates, and soon canceled them all.
“That’s when I really got to know him,” she said. “He was very transparent and real.”
The pair later headed to his Airbnb 10 minutes away. “She stayed the night, and the next night I stayed at her place,” he said. “We’ve been together ever since.”
And, they have sipped Champagne — usually Veuve Clicquot — together every day since.
After 10 days in Miami, he accompanied her to New York while she went to a wedding with her best friend on New Year’s Eve. The three later rang in the New Year at a Champagne gala.
“We clicked physically, we clicked mentally,” she said.
She then accompanied him to Costa Rica, where he is involved in a real estate development project, for five days. Before they headed to Kauai, after a two-day stop in Miami, he added her as his significant other to his membership at the Club at Kukui’ula, a residential community and club where he lives.
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“We were totally in love and living together from our second date,” said Ms. Lyles, either in Miami or Kauai, where she worked remotely. “We’d sit in the Jacuzzi, and watch the sunset.”
After a month, they started remotely seeing Mr. Verstappen’s life coach to help them better listen to each other. “We’re both strong people bumping heads sometimes,” he said.
In March 2023, en route to visit his family in Adelaide, they explored wine country and attended a charity event in California. Then they spent a couple days in Sydney where they stayed and went to the red carpet opening of the Capella Sydney hotel.
“Kelly brings a whole different level to the fun,” Mr. Verstappen said.
“I’m very much a traveler,” she said. “I run out of pages in my passport.”
In September 2023, he rented a boat on a canal in Amsterdam, and said he missed an opportunity to propose. “I didn’t have a ring.”
On New Year’s Day 2024, after a heavy discussion the night before, ring or no ring, he got down on both knees in the morning.
“The words were serious enough for me,” she said. (An ethically sourced emerald-cut diamond ring, however, followed in March.)
On July 17, Malasri Chaudhery Malgeri, a nondenominational pastor of Rose Ministries, and their life coach, officiated before 190 guests at Viansa Winery in Sonoma, Calif.
The bride walked down a mirrored aisle with two flower girls as white butterflies were released, and Melky Jean, a friend of the bride and a Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter, sang “Love is a Miracle,” which she wrote for the occasion.
“We’re going to toast our way through this life,” Ms. Lyles said, “with Champagne.”
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