Samantha Lee Rosensweig’s job as a senior marketing manager at Bumble feeds her passion for relationship building. “I love people connecting with people on any sort of level,” she said.
So when it came to her attention that John-Jay Richard Pontrelli wasn’t quite sure about their level of connection after a month of dating, she spoke up right away.
“I don’t want to seem like I was eavesdropping,” Ms. Rosensweig said to Mr. Pontrelli in February 2018, as they were walking to her apartment in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood after running into one of his cousins at a Lower East Side bar. “But I saw your cousin ask you, ‘Is that your girlfriend,’ and you said, ‘I don’t know.’ What does that mean?”
Mr. Pontrelli, who goes by J.J., didn’t realize Ms. Rosensweig had been within earshot of the conversation. And in fact she wasn’t: hard of hearing in one ear since childhood, Ms. Rosensweig can read lips. “That’s Sam’s party trick,” he said.
It might also be an effective way to move the needle forward in a new relationship. By the time they reached her apartment that night, they were a couple.
Ms. Rosensweig and Mr. Pontrelli, both 29, met on Bumble in January 2018, before Ms. Rosensweig started working there. Each had recently graduated from college, Ms. Rosensweig with a bachelor’s degree in political science from Colgate University and Mr. Pontrelli with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Towson University.
Ms. Rosensweig, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, was living with a roommate in Greenwich Village. Mr. Pontrelli, now a senior account executive at Shopify, was living with his parents in Closter, N.J., to save money for a move to New York City. He had downloaded Bumble, his first dating app, two weeks earlier when he matched with Ms. Rosensweig.
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“I was super attracted to him,” she said. “You could tell what his energy was like from his photos.” After two weeks of app chatting, they met Jan. 28 at Wilfie & Nell, a West Village bar, for a first date. There, “we had an instant sense of familiarity,” Mr. Pontrelli said. “It stopped feeling like a date.” Ms. Rosensweig texted to ask for a second date before he made it back to Closter that night.
That summer each got to know the other’s family. Ms. Rosensweig’s parents, Linda and Daniel Rosensweig, live in Manhattan and keep a vacation house in Montauk, N.Y. Weekends there and in New Jersey with Mr. Pontrelli’s parents, Wendy Butler and Jay Pontrelli, who are divorced, added a layer of certainty about their compatibility. “The family dynamic was meant to work out,” Mr. Pontrelli said.
By the end of 2019, Mr. Pontrelli was planning to move into Ms. Rosensweig’s apartment in TriBeCa from a place he was sharing with friends in Columbus Circle. That move was postponed by the pandemic. But the couple started living together anyway.
In Montauk, they spent eight months with Ms. Rosensweig’s parents and her older sister, Rachel Rosensweig, who had also holed up there while the world was on its heels with her boyfriend, Adam Roberts, now her husband. “Talk about getting to know your in-laws,” Mr. Pontrelli said. In 2021, they both returned to the apartment in TriBeCa, where they still live.
On May 20, 2023, Mr. Pontrelli lured Ms. Rosensweig to her parents’ apartment, where despite a spring rainstorm, he proposed on the rooftop. “I was on one knee in a puddle,” he said.
The couple were married Sept. 14 by Christopher Ashton Kutcher, the actor known as Ashton Kutcher, who has long been a family friend of the Rosensweigs. He obtained a one-day officiant license from the Town of East Hampton to perform the wedding ceremony at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, N.Y., before 228 guests.
In a nod to the family’s obsession with Bruce Springsteen, a quartet of musicians played an acoustic version of “Jungleland” as they walked toward Mr. Pontrelli.
After they stomped a glass to mark the start of their new life together, the couple recessed down the outdoor aisle to Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon.” Halfway through, with crickets chirping softly in the museum yard’s grass and the Hamptons sun setting, Mr. Pontrelli dipped his wife and kissed her.
“The greatest thing about this love story,” Mr. Kutcher had told them at the ceremony, “is that it’s one of a kind and it’s yours.”
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