Charles Victor Barraza traded four brand-new snow tires for the blue Hermès necktie he wore at his Jan. 10 wedding to Margaret Mary Victor.
The exchange didn’t make financial sense. The tie, he later learned from the co-worker who offered it, cost about $300. The tires he had bought but decided he didn’t really need were worth nearly $800. For him, the value of the tie mattered less than reinforcing his bride’s idea of him as a sharp dresser.
The beginning of his courtship with Ms. Victor put him on the wrong side of a situation involving numbers, too: In February 2021, when she found out on their first date that he was 16 years her senior, she was more than a little dismayed. “I was really thrown and quite concerned,” she said.
That, he told her politely, was her problem.
Ms. Victor and Mr. Barraza met in September 2020 through Shorewalkers, a New York City environmental walking group. (Motto: “See the world at three miles per hour.”) Mr. Barraza, who had just joined, found Ms. Victor’s behavior on a trek over the Queensboro Bridge jarring.
“I saw somebody waving at the people on the tram that crosses the bridge to Roosevelt Island, and then a couple of minutes later, the subway went across, and the same hand went up, waving at people,” he said. The hand belonged to Ms. Victor. “She seemed friendly and unguarded. It struck me — that’s not a New York girl.”
Ms. Victor, 67, is a venue sales director at the Kupferberg Center for the Arts at Queens College. She grew up in Pomona, Calif., and Lake Arrowhead, Calif., with four younger sisters and their parents, Rebecca and Aiden Rex Victor, who have since died.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in radio, television and film from California State University, Northridge, she spent decades building a career in advertising and hospitality in states including Oregon and New Mexico. Then her former husband’s career brought her to the East Coast.
She didn’t expect to be enchanted by New York City in 2007, when they settled in Park Slope, Brooklyn. But “I fell in love with it,” she said. The spell the city cast developed into an eagerness to explore its every byway and thoroughfare. Shorewalkers, which she joined in 2016, enabled it.
Mr. Barraza, 83, is a native New Yorker and a product specialist at the Apple Store in the Staten Island Mall; he goes by Chuck. He grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with a younger sister and their parents, Angelina and Mexico Barraza; both have died. Aside from a yearlong sojourn to his father’s native El Salvador when he was 10, he has lived in New York City his entire life.
After graduating from the former Charles Evans Hughes High School in Chelsea, now known as the Bayard Rustin Educational Complex, he worked as an insurance underwriter for several companies, retiring from Chubb in 2008. By then, he had married twice and become a weekend skydiving instructor. But he was by no means ready to quit working full time.
“I knew from a very early age that retirement was never going to be for me,” he said. He has been helping customers mystified by their laptops and iPhones since 2009, offering limited sympathy to fellow seniors who complain of technological overwhelm. “I don’t hesitate to share my age with people to prove that age is no excuse.”
When Mr. Barraza joined Shorewalkers, it was partly to appease his sister, Linda Schoenfeld, who was worried he had become lonely after the death of his wife, Patricia, in 2018. (A brief first marriage ended in divorce in 1982; neither Mr. Barraza nor Ms. Victor has children). He and Patricia had been married for 33 years. Some days, his heartache still felt fresh.
“I wasn’t in the mood to meet people,” he said.
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Ms. Victor’s wave at strangers on passing public transit didn’t compel him to get to know her right away. But after four months of chitchat, when their walking pace was in sync, her friendliness started having a tonic effect.
On Feb. 20, 2021, he asked if she would like to meet him the next day for lunch and a stroll around the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His relief when she said yes was replaced by confusion in short order.
“I didn’t know if it was a date or a meet-up,” he said. When she arrived, he made the mistake of asking her.
“I took offense,” Ms. Victor said. “I said, ‘I shaved my legs for this. Yes, it’s a date.’” She was even more offended later, when he revealed he was almost 80. Because of the pandemic, they were used to seeing each other in masks; she had assumed he was at least a decade younger.
“She was shocked and a little bit outraged,” Mr. Barraza said, especially when he added that he had thought she was in her mid-50s.
“I said, ‘What business do you have dating someone that many years younger?’” she said. But he was unapologetic. “My response was, ‘Not my problem,’” he said.
Both went home that day — he to his house on Staten Island, she to the apartment in Elmhurst, Queens, she bought after her 2017 divorce — less than besotted.
“We determined we’d be friends,” Ms. Victor said. Then Mr. Barraza turned on the charm.
Both say her resolve about keeping the relationship platonic started softening in March 2021, when he gave her a ride to a Shorewalkers outing in Westchester County. She didn’t expect the dozen Magnolia Bakery cupcakes she found when she climbed into his Subaru. “Chuck surprised me with them,” she said. “He had remembered me mentioning how much I enjoyed them.”
Ms. Victor, a dedicated list maker, had by then started keeping a handwritten tally of his thoughtful gestures. Her jottings under “Things I like about Chuck” included “liked the Youth-Dew perfume I was wearing” and “holds my arm when walking over snow and ice on Shorewalkers walks.”
She asked if she could kiss him on the cheek at the end of the Westchester trip. “He was such a sweet gentleman,” she said.
Maybe too sweet, his sister thought. In April 2021, Ms. Schoenfeld started getting nervous for Mr. Barraza when he floated the idea of buying Ms. Victor a Tiffany & Company necklace for her birthday. “She thought it was too much, too soon,” he said.
A cadre of Ms. Schoenfeld’s co-workers at American Airlines, where she has been a flight attendant for 53 years, thought so, too.
“I would run to them all the time with the stories he was telling me about this person he met walking who’s always happy, who everyone gravitates to,” she said. When she shared the news that he wanted to buy the necklace, the consensus was, “Oh, no,” she said.
Mr. Barraza bought it anyway. He and Ms. Victor were walking along the Hudson River on April 11, 2021, when they peeled off from the other Shorewalkers so he could present her a long-stemmed red rose and the blue Tiffany & Company box. “She looked at it and said, ‘Well, I guess you’re my boyfriend now,’” he said.
That was fine by him. But having a boyfriend wasn’t ultimately what Ms. Victor wanted. “I loved being married, and I knew I wanted to be married again,” she said. Mr. Barraza felt ambivalent.
After he was widowed, “I knew I eventually wanted to have someone in my life,” he said. “But I didn’t have to be married.”
Ms. Victor contented herself with being his girlfriend until 2024. But by the fall of that year, she started to worry that the relationship was stuck in a holding pattern. She didn’t want to ask for an engagement ring. “So I proposed he buy me a promise ring,” she said. “I went back to my 16-year-old self for that term.”
On Nov. 15, they went to David Yurman at Bloomingdale’s together and picked out a white gold ring with diamonds. They decided before they left the sales counter that she should think of it as her engagement ring.
“I had reminded him I didn’t want to be his forever girlfriend,” she said. “I guess I forced the issue.”
In October 2025, Ms. Victor sold her apartment and moved into Mr. Barraza’s house on Staten Island. This year, they plan to sell that house and look for a new apartment together in Manhattan or Brooklyn. They’ll move in as a married couple.
On Jan. 10, at the Westlake Village Inn in Westlake Village, Calif., 35 guests joined them for an outdoor wedding officiated by the Rev. John E. Denaro, an Episcopal priest and the rector of St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, where both are parishioners.
Ms. Victor wore a STAUD floral brocade dress with a square neckline, pearls and Valentino sling-back heels. Mr. Barraza wore a black Hugo Boss suit and the Hermès tie he traded the tires for. On their walk down an aisle decorated with greenery, Ms. Victor clutched a bouquet of white roses. Ms. Schoenfeld was matron of honor.
Despite their early misgivings about age, Rev. Denaro said, their urban wanderings had grown into a surprising journey of the heart.
“We couldn’t be more excited to walk alongside you,” he said before Mr. Barrazo kissed Ms. Victor.
On This Day
When Jan. 10, 2026
Where The Westlake Village Inn, Westlake Village, Calif.
Good Cheer The couple chose to marry in California for its proximity to family. Three of Ms. Victor’s sisters live there. Ms. Schoenfeld lives in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Before the wedding, Mr. Barraza was reminded he wasn’t marrying into a family of jaded New Yorkers. “I’m gaining a lot of sisters-in-law,” he said. “They’re all very nice and very friendly.”
French Connection A reception at the inn included a signature drink, “the French 75,” recently discovered by the bride at the Montague Diner in Brooklyn Heights. Dinner options included miso-glazed sea bass and braised short ribs. Framed photos of the couple, captured on various Shorewalkers walks, were displayed on the cake table.
A Good Thing When Ms. Schoenfeld met Ms. Victor for the first time in 2023, she was glad Mr. Barraza had ignored her 2021 advice to hold off on buying the Tiffany & Company necklace. “I watched them interact, and it was, honey this, honey that,” she said. “I thought, this is going to be a good thing. I can see the happiness she’s brought my brother.”
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