Elsa Alvarado and Hunter Edison Stoll had both spent at least a few years dating around when they connected on Bumble in August 2021.
Stoll was beginning to doubt he would ever find his ideal partner, while Alvarado held out hope.
“I had gone on dates here and there, but I hadn’t felt the spark with anyone I met,” he said. “I went into Bumble with low expectations.”
Stoll was a graduate student at Georgetown at the time, and she had just moved to Washington from Ridgewood, Queens, for a new job at the Pentagon.
“I was looking for love and always found lovely guys, but there was no excitement past the first date,” Alvarado said. “I always knew I’d find my match in D.C. because I figured I’d meet someone with a love of politics and foreign policy like me.”
The two messaged on the app and instantly clicked. Their conversations touched on a mutual love of big band music, speakeasies and living abroad. Alvarado had been in Beijing for graduate school, while Stoll had lived in Iraq and Kuwait during his service as a First Lieutenant in the Army.
Alvarado invited Stoll to a summer party she was hosting on her apartment building’s rooftop. She had been renting a studio in a high-rise in the city’s Navy Yard neighborhood, while Stoll lived in a condominium in Cathedral Heights, about an hour away by public transportation.
Both were nervous about meeting, but they hit it off right away. “Hunter had the biggest smile,” Alvarado said. “I found him open, funny and self-assured.”
“Elsa was more beautiful than her profile picture could do justice,” Stoll said. “Her personality was very D.C. — professional, articulate and confident.”
The two had their first official date a week later over dinner at Mi Vida, a Mexican restaurant in the Wharf district on the Potomac waterfront. “The discussion flowed so smoothly, and there was never any awkwardness,” Alvarado said.
They shared a laugh over the spiciness of the food, which left both sweating. “I became concerned as beads of sweat were rolling down my forehead and feared that this relationship was doomed to fail because she liked spicy food,” Stoll said. “Much to my joy and surprise, she was also suffering.”
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After dinner, they strolled along the boardwalk and ended up on a swing in front of the Washington Channel, where Stoll leaned in to kiss Alvarado. “I was so happy and had been impatiently waiting for this moment,” she said.
They considered themselves a couple from then on, talking daily and spending most of their free time together. Alvarado said that, a week in, she was sure she wanted to marry Stoll. “I wrote a note on my iPhone that said, ‘I met the man I think I’m going to spend the rest of my life with,’” she said.
Stoll said that he knew from the moment they met. “I marveled at her intellectual curiosity and her ambition,” he said. “I knew that together we could conquer the world.”
Alvarado, 29, whose parents immigrated from Managua, Nicaragua, to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, grew up in Ridgewood, Queens. She is a senior vice president who works remotely for the Brooklyn-based Democratic political consulting firm Slingshot Strategies. She has a bachelor’s degree in political science from Middlebury College and a master’s in global affairs from Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Stoll, 32, was born and grew up in Kansas City, Mo. He is a defense policy analyst at Rand, a Washington-based nonpartisan global policy think tank and research organization. He also works part-time as an Army historian in the Army Reserve in Washington. Stoll has bachelor’s degrees in history and secondary social studies education from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a master’s in security studies from Georgetown.
It wasn’t just politics and foreign policy that connected them — it was also dogs. They have fostered four together and share an Australian shepherd, Smokey.
Their relationship also thrived on introducing each other to new interests. Stoll took Alvarado to Kansas City Chiefs games, including in Missouri, and showed her the beauty of national parks. Alvarado took him to New York so they could see Broadway shows like “Chicago” and “Funny Girl.”
By the fall of 2021, they had met each other’s families, and in November, when Stoll’s lease ended, he moved into Alvarado’s studio apartment. The couple has since moved into an apartment in Pentagon City.
The pair became engaged in June 2024 when Stoll proposed on vacation in Seville, Spain. They were married May 13 by Guohuan Zhang, an officiant at the Manhattan City Clerk’s office, before six guests.
Later that day, Stoll and Alvarado gathered with their families at Zum Stammtisch, a German restaurant in Glendale, N.Y.
The night ended with Stoll giving a speech to Alvarado’s family in her native Spanish. “He told them how much he appreciated them welcoming him like a son and was 100 percent fluent,” she said. Because she was unaware that he had secretly been learning the language, she was in “total shock.”
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