In July 2022, Jurgen Peeters was with friends at the corner cafe Ginja de Alfama in Lisbon, when he noticed a woman reading by herself.
Sitting at the only other occupied table at the now-shuttered cafe was Rachel Morgan Leiner, who was taking time off from work to travel solo. The group with Mr. Peeters needed a sixth person to play a card game, so Ms. Leiner was invited over.
Soon, Ms. Leiner and Mr. Peeters found themselves talking to just each other, the other friends forgotten. They never played the card game.
“It was very clear to me that she was not a shy person like myself,” he said. “That, paired with her beauty, made it a no-brainer for me.”
“Really nice people are hard to come by,” Ms Leiner said. “I could tell pretty instantaneously that he had a good heart.”
Mr. Peeters, 26, is a customer success representative at LIZY, a car-leasing company for small businesses in Belgium, France and the Netherlands. He was born and raised in Wemmel, Belgium. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Ms. Leiner, 27, is a self-employed wedding photographer. She was born and raised in Merrick, N.Y. She holds a bachelor’s degree in advertising from Boston University and currently lives in Brooklyn, where Mr. Peeters is expected to join her in two years.
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
Over the course of the next seven days, Ms. Leiner was invited to all of the friend group’s outings. On one occasion, she mentioned that Mr. Peeters resembled an acquaintance in New York. A friend in the group asked, “Do you think that guy is hot?” She said no.
It was a lie, of course. Ms. Leiner indeed found him attractive. But to Mr. Peeters, it was a sign she wasn’t interested. “What else could it mean?” he said.
One night, the two of them went out alone, after everyone else had gone home. They spent the rest of the night dancing at Loucura Bar & Club, spinning each other around and holding hands. To Mr. Peeters, it was platonic. But Ms. Leiner was wondering when he was finally going to kiss her.
“He walked me back to my hotel, and we were just standing there,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Are you going to kiss me, or what?’” He did.
They spent the rest of the weeklong trip together, but ultimately agreed not to pursue a relationship. “We knew it was special, but I don’t think either of us thought it was going to be anything more,” Ms. Leiner said.
After the trip, Mr. Peeters went to Ireland to meet some friends. Ms. Leiner was headed to Amsterdam, where he suggested they meet for one night. They spent 24 hours together, where they asked each other “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love,” a set of personal questions published by a team of psychologists in 1997 (and in this newspaper in 2015).
With Ms. Leiner headed back to America, the two still agreed on not pursuing a long-distance relationship. For two and a half months, they exchanged weekly, lengthy texts over WhatsApp, which they called “modern-day love letters.”
“The letters were like a pulse,” Mr. Peeters said. “We were still keeping something alive.”
In November 2022, Ms. Leiner bought herself a ticket to a Maggie Rogers concert in Amsterdam. The two agreed to meet up, then went to Bruges, Belgium, where they said “I love you” for the first time. (The concert was ultimately rescheduled for the following summer.)
After the trip, Ms. Leiner and Mr. Peeters found themselves feeling differently about being long-distance. They decided to make it work, and did so for the next three years — made easier by Mr. Peeters’s vacation time and Ms. Leiner’s job flexibility.
This May, the couple decided to marry, with the proposal coming after the paperwork for a wedding in Brussels was underway. What was more important to them was how they told Ms. Leiner’s parents.
“We went to Carvel, and we got a cake that said ‘We’re Getting Married!’ on it,” she said. “We presented the cake, and they all freaked out.” It was the same way her parents had announced a pregnancy to their own parents nearly three decades earlier.
On Dec. 22, the couple were married before 13 guests at the Ixelles City Hall in Brussels. A civil registrar, Gautier Calomne, officiated the ceremony.
For her wedding dress, Ms. Leiner wore a dress she found at a thrift store in Scotland almost two years ago. “I’ve never tried on a wedding dress,” she said, “but for some reason, I knew this was the one.”
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