David Ross Goldblum’s first in-person encounter with Andrea Perez Martinez was at Los Angeles International Airport in January 2024. The two had matched on the dating app Raya one week earlier, and while messaging, she mentioned she would be returning from a work trip to Mexico and needed a ride home.
Goldblum, a filmmaker and producer, reached out to her on Instagram where they continued talking. He felt he “needed to seize the moment to see if we were a fit,” so he offered to pick her up at the airport.
“Finding me on Instagram got my attention,” said Martinez, 36, the founder of OMMM, a global meditation program. She had been in Mexico City recording a meditation album and teaching classes.
“When I saw him holding the sign with my name on it, I took photos of him, as if I’d known him my entire life,” she said.
During the 90-minute drive to Martinez’s home in Topanga Canyon, they passed the Inn of the Seventh Ray, an open-air restaurant and event space. Goldblum asked Martinez if she had ever been. She had not.
Although it was 10:30 p.m. and the restaurant was closed, the lights were still on and music was playing. “We snuck in and found a table by the creek,” he said. “All these fairy lights were twinkling. We ate some snacks I’d brought and talked. We felt like old friends who needed to catch up.”
By midnight, they shared a first kiss in Martinez’s kitchen.
“I felt like I’d been waiting my entire life for him,” said Martinez, who had been on Raya for about six months. “I was close to marrying other people before, but there was always a feeling of, he’s not the one. David disarmed my nervous system.”
Goldblum, 39, grew up in Greenlawn, N.Y., and graduated from The New School with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts before getting his master’s in screenwriting from U.C.L.A.
Martinez, 36, grew up in Reynosa, Mexico, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey in Mexico. She also earned a professional diploma in fashion design from Istituto di Moda Burgo in Milan.
The pair became exclusive after their first date. Aside from sharing a passion for wellness and spirituality, they found internal commonality — a yearning for similar values and anchoring.
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
Martinez’s father had died when she was 7 from a brain aneurysm. “That was devastating and destabilizing,” she said. “I found security and stability and saw many of my father’s good qualities in David.”
Goldblum felt the same. “From our first day together I felt what I’d always been missing,” he said.
In May, they moved in together to a three-story rental in Topanga.
By September, they were forced to move out after discovering black mold. They quickly found what they called their dream house: a two-bedroom rental in Malibu overlooking the ocean. Four months later, in January 2025, came the Palisades fire.
While Martinez was away at a meditation retreat, Goldblum looked out his office window and saw massive flames. “I couldn’t think rationally,” he said. “I took a video of it, got in the car, and sped down a mountain. The only possessions I had were in my gym bag, which held my computer.”
Like many others, he thought he’d be back in a few days once the smoke cleared. But they never returned, and everything they owned was lost. “We were mourning the expectation of being settled and building a life together,” Martinez said.
The couple moved into a third location in less than eight months, a 300-square-foot hotel room for people displaced by the fires. Goldblum began filming the experience, which later became the documentary “Big Rock Burning,” by executive producers Mark Hamill and Ricki Lake. Martinez taught meditation from the corner of their hotel room.
That March, desperate for a change and aching for New York, where both had lived in their 20s, they rented an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “New York made us feel like we were coming back to life,” Goldblum said. “We had permission to find joy again.”
Where constant upheaval and displacement would have fractured many relationships, it became the glue that sealed their future.
In November, while rowing a rented boat in Central Park, he proposed.
The couple returned to California this June. Hoping to put down permanent roots, they found a two-bedroom home in Ojai, Calif.
On Oct. 10, they married on Meditation Mount, a meditation center in Ojai, intentionally at 10 a.m., in front of 20 friends and family members. “The timing and day mirrors balance and harmony,” Martinez said. The actor Jeff Kober, a longtime friend of the groom, who was ordained through Rose Ministries of Las Vegas, officiated.
Looking back on their relationship, “the fire removed all the noise,” Martinez said. “I had no possessions. But I had the one person that mattered.”
The post Building, Then Rebuilding, a Life Together After the Palisades Fire appeared first on New York Times.
