When Ryan Jesse Daniels matched with Dr. Sandra Michelle Goldlust on Hinge in May 2021, he was immediately hooked. “Her profile really stood out to me,” he said. “I remember I kept thinking about it for months after.” He even took a screenshot of it and sent it to a friend with a message saying he had found the perfect person.
The only problem: His message to Dr. Goldlust, an attending hospitalist physician at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan, went unreturned. “Sandra never responded,” he said, laughing.
But Mr. Daniels, a founder and the chief executive of Crosby, a legal AI start-up in New York City, was undeterred. He followed her on Instagram and waited patiently.
It took a little over a year. Dr. Goldlust wrote a post on Instagram saying her best friend had just moved to Saudi Arabia and was looking for friends. Mr. Daniels happened to know a few people there and responded to her message. They started chatting, and he said they had matched on a dating app in the past, and he would love to take her out. This time she responded, and she said yes.
But their first date, in August 2022, at Union Square Cafe, only lasted 40 minutes because Dr. Goldlust was a resident and between two 27-hour shifts at NYU Langone Health. Mr. Daniels thought the date had gone poorly because she was in such a rush to leave, so he tried again to impress her by inviting her to a Shabbat dinner he was hosting a few days later for 30 people. He made salt-baked arctic char.
“I was really impressed seeing him cook for all these people and build this community,” Dr. Goldlust said. “We spent hours talking on the rooftop after dinner, and it was like we just clicked.”
For the next two weeks, Mr. Daniels was at Burning Man, his third trip to the festival, with no cellphone service. But he still found a way to communicate with Dr. Goldlust. “I was riding my bike, and there was this satellite pay phone installation thing,” he said. “I went back to my tent, got my phone, wrote down Sandra’s phone number, and rode my bike back to the installation and left her a voice mail message.”
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“This guy who I had been on two dates with called and left a message that said, ‘I’m at Burning Man, and I hope this isn’t weird, but I’ve really been thinking about you,’” she said. “It was really sweet and funny.”
When he returned, they were inseparable. “It was so natural I don’t even think we had a conversation about me becoming his girlfriend,” she said.
That fall, Mr. Daniels threw a 30th birthday party for his new girlfriend, whose birthday is Oct. 28. “He had this house party with skeletons and elaborate decorations that said death to my 20s,” she said. He also built a decorative coffin that he filled with balloons.
Mr. Daniels, 32, grew up in Toronto. He received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He received his law degree from Stanford.
Dr. Goldlust, also 32, grew up in Cherry Hill, N.J. She received a bachelor’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton. She holds a masters of science in biohazardous threat agents and emerging infectious diseases from Georgetown, and her medical degree from N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine.
In the fall of 2023, they moved in together to a loft in Chelsea, and a year later, in October 2024, they became engaged at a rustic cabin in Quebec that used to be owned by Dr. Goldlust’s grandparents. “It was this mystical legend place she always talked about, and I knew I had to do it there,” he said. He tracked down the current owners and worked out the tricky logistics for them to visit for a few hours.
“It made me really emotional,” Dr. Goldlust said. “I felt like my grandparents were still there with me.”
The couple held a ceremony led by Rabbi Eitan Webb from the Princeton Chabad on Aug. 31 at Alder Manor, a historic estate in Yonkers. They were legally married on Sept. 9 by Huiling Zheng at the Office of the City Clerk in Brooklyn.
The Labor Day weekend celebration started on Friday night, with a Shabbat dinner for their immediate families at their apartment.
The next day, in lieu of a rehearsal dinner, the couple hosted a workshop for 80 friends and a few family members, asking them to make eye contact, answer deep personal questions written by the couple and do sound healing exercises.
“The idea is that you probably have one day where all your friends from different life stages are together, and we want them to really get to know each other,” Mr. Daniels said.
The ceremony took place in a huppah built by the bride’s father that all three of her older siblings have also used in their weddings. Once the traditional glass was broken, the crowd descended into a 30-minute horah.
“It’s an explosion of excitement,” Mr. Daniels said. “Just pure joy.”
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