Fern Watt showed up for her first date with Max Benjamin Horwitz in August 2020, knowing things might go haywire.
“I was looking at Bette like, please don’t mess this up,” Ms. Watt said of her 40-pound cattle dog mix. “She’s high-strung and doesn’t let many humans into her inner circle.”
For months after the onset of Covid, it had been just the two of them in her apartment in Beachwood Canyon, Calif. But meeting Mr. Horwitz for a sunset beach picnic in Venice Beach, where he lived alone with his labradoodle, Oscar, wasn’t an invitation she wanted to pass up.
Both were starved for human companionship. “It was those days when people didn’t want to see anybody not in their bubble,” Mr. Horwitz said.
That Ms. Watt, Mr. Horwitz, Bette and Oscar managed to hit it off despite Bette’s issues and a charcuterie board caked in sand feels remarkable to both. “We had a first kiss standing in the ocean with water up to our knees,” Ms. Watt said of that night. “It felt like a rom-com.”
Ms. Watt, who said she has always related to Sally Albright, the Meg Ryan character from “When Harry Met Sally…,” is well versed in them.
Ms. Watt, 36, and Mr. Horwitz, 35, met in the fall of 2009, when both were students aboard a Semester at Sea ship bound for 13 countries in 110 days. Ms. Watt, who grew up in Nashville, was working toward a bachelor’s degree in journalism and communications at the University of Tennessee. She now works as an author and the founder of New York Dog Parade.
Mr. Horwitz, who grew up in Tampa, Fla., was earning a degree in political science at the University of Colorado. He is the vice president of the nonprofit Business Council for International Understanding.
Their interaction aboard the ship was minimal enough that neither had any real intention of keeping in touch when they disembarked. But a Facebook alumni group reconnected them in early 2020.
“Fern had posted about being in L.A., and that made me reach out to her,” Mr. Horwitz said. He didn’t have his sights set on kissing her in the surf, necessarily, when he arranged for the August picnic.
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
“I remembered her for sure,” he said. But romance was less important at the time than maintaining a social life. Still, after a handful of post-picnic dates, they were falling in love. An October road trip home from Salt Lake City, where Mr. Horwitz was vacationing with family, sealed the deal.
“The second he asked me to fly out I was like, let me think about it,” Ms. Watt said. “But in my head, I couldn’t wait.” Mr. Horwitz was excited, too, and “immediately” started reading the books she had written.
In November, he asked her to be his girlfriend via fortune cookie. “I had it specially made,” he said.
His marriage proposal in January 2022 on a ferry in Southern Patagonia during a vacation also came as a surprise. And both were surprised when, after a cross-country move that September, they found an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan big enough to accommodate a king-size bed and both dogs.
Less surprising was Ms. Watt’s decision to start studying Judaism soon after. She had been moved by Shabbat dinners with Mr. Horwitz’s family early on. “I found a warmth there, and wisdom,” she said. In 2024, after nearly two years of study with the American Jewish University and a trip to Israel, she converted. The same year, she founded a nonprofit group, New York Dog Parade, which produces canine-themed events.
And she started planning their wedding. “A lot of people wouldn’t necessarily associate pastrami and Reubens with romance,” Ms. Watt said. But to her, Katz’s Deli, home of the “I’ll have what she’s having” scene from “When Harry Met Sally…,” is as romantic as it is iconic.
“It’s such a special scene in such a special rom-com,” she said.
On May 19, the couple gathered with 160 friends and family at the deli for a black-tie wedding. Loren Sykes, a rabbi from Jerusalem who was a director at Mr. Horwitz’s summer camp, officiated.
“Over the past months, I’ve spoken many sentences I never thought I would say when it came to planning my wedding,” Ms. Watt said. “Like, ‘We’ll hang the roses from the sausages.’”
Their “I do’s” under a huppah wedged beneath a salami sign were capped with the stomping of a glass and a reception that, had it not been a private event, might have caused a Lower East Side stampede: The full deli menu was on offer for ordering.
“It was pretty amazing to see people in black tie and gowns ordering piles of deli sandwich meat,” Mr. Horwitz said.
Ms. Watt described it differently: “It was magical,” she said.
The post They Said Their ‘I Dos’ Near the Roses and Rye Bread appeared first on New York Times.
