After a monthlong online courtship with high hopes of romance, Dr. Jacob Edwarde Perlson and Ethan Shane Wise were both underwhelmed by their first date in July 2019.
They had matched on Hinge in June and connected, but wouldn’t have the chance to meet until Perlson moved to Boston, where Wise lived. Perlson had just finished his third year of medical school at Dartmouth in Hanover, N.H., and was taking a break to start a yearlong master of public health degree at Harvard.
Both were seeking long-term love.
“Being a single queer person in rural New Hampshire was often lonely,” Perlson, who goes by Jake, said. “I felt like this year in the big city was an opportunity to start a relationship that could last.”
Wise, who lived in Boston’s South End neighborhood and worked as a business manager for an architecture firm, was a year out of a hard breakup and said he was ready to find “the right guy.”
When Perlson learned that Wise had written a poetry book for his college thesis, he suggested they each send the other a poem a day until they met. “The idea was born from a desire to learn more about Ethan,” he said.
The two started what both said was an “exciting” text exchange of their favorite poems. They made plans for the day Perlson moved into his rental on the border of Brookline and Boston.
But when he picked Wise up at his apartment, they exchanged what Wise said was an “awkward” kiss. “Neither of us could quite figure out which way to move or how long it was supposed to last,” he said.
They walked to Wise’s favorite restaurant in Chinatown, Dumpling Cafe, where they talked about their upbringings and discovered that they both came from liberal Jewish families with strong mothers to whom they are close.
“We managed to gab about everything and nothing, but we were both feeling like we hadn’t quite aced it,” Wise said.
Still, they agreed that it was worth giving their potential romance another chance and met again the following night at Petit Robert Bistro, a French restaurant in the South End. Over dinner, the two opened up to each other about their professional and personal aspirations and traded jokes, laughing throughout the meal. “There was something there,” Wise said.
They started seeing each other regularly from then on. On the way home from catching the movie “Judy” in October 2019, they deleted Hinge from their phones and decided to be boyfriends.
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Perlson, 33, grew up in Deerfield, Ill. He is a psychiatrist at Callen-Lorde Community Health Center in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and also has a private practice on the Upper West Side. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a master of public health degree from Harvard and a medical degree from Dartmouth.
Wise, also 33, is from Fairfield, Conn. He is a freelance graphic designer and a first-year graduate student in design at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Tufts in Medford, Mass.
The pandemic brought them even closer. When one of Perlson’s roommates moved out, Wise, who was working remotely, moved in, and after Perlson earned a master’s degree, the two headed to New Hampshire so he could finish medical school. They welcomed a goldendoodle, Hercules, and continued to integrate their lives.
“We were living in a micro-bubble despite the uncertainty in the world,” Perlson said. “We managed to find the coziness of a snow day despite the apocalyptic backdrop.”
In spring 2021, he matched with his first-choice residency, in adult psychiatry at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital (Columbia campus)/New York State Psychiatric Institute program, and the two moved to New York that May. They found an apartment in South Harlem and have since moved into another unit in the same building.
A week into living in the city, they took Hercules to the dog run at Morningside Park, where they met and quickly became friends with another dog owner, Nephi Niven. It was he who introduced them to the Radical Faeries, a queer countercultural movement.
Niven invited the couple to a house party in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, with many Radical Faeries among the guests; most wore vibrant outfits or were dressed in drag. “We realized quickly that these were our people,” Wise said.
By fall 2023, they had talked about marriage and designed their gold wedding bands.
The pair became engaged that October, at Diet Zhuzh, a now-defunct queer rave held at different venues around the city. That evening’s event, at the Parkside Lounge on the Lower East Side, included an informal fashion show, where attendees strutted down the dance floor to show off their outfits. When Wise had his turn, he turned around to walk back and saw Perlson down on one knee, waiting to propose.
They wed Sept. 27 before 11 guests in the living room of a home in Hunter, N.Y., that they rented through Airbnb. Wise’s brother, Harper Wise, who was ordained by the Universal Life Church, officiated. Hercules served as the ring bearer.
Their ceremony incorporated Jewish and Radical Faerie traditions, including a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl, which hung in the background, and an altar with objects from family members who couldn’t attend.
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