Lisa Ann Tarantino and William Bruce Peeker IV agree that they were always meant to end up together. It was just a question of when their paths would cross.
The two didn’t bother introducing themselves when they met in January 2021 for their first date at Revelry Brewing Co., in downtown Charleston, S.C. They had matched on Hinge the week before and had been messaging on the app since, developing a friendly rapport.
“We recognized each other from our Hinge profiles and started talking right away,” Ms. Tarantino said. “It felt like old friends getting together.”
“Lisa was very beautiful and seemed very organized,” Mr. Peeker said. “We immediately clicked.”
Over three rounds of local beer, they chatted about their Long Island upbringings, the challenges of not being able to see family and friends because of Covid and their love of baseball. Mr. Peeker is a die-hard Mets devotee; Ms. Tarantino roots for the Yankees.
She had moved to South Carolina from New York three weeks earlier when her job in advertising went remote. “I wanted more space and didn’t want to be cooped up in my small apartment in New York,” she said. She was renting an apartment in Mount Pleasant, S.C., just outside Charleston.
Mr. Peeker, who goes by Billy, had been living in Charleston for four years. He had moved to start a job at the Department of Veterans Affairs at a medical center and lived in a condominium near the brewery.
Both wanted to get married and were looking for the “one,” they said.
Not ready for the evening to end after drinks, they continued their date at Edmund’s Oast, now called Edmund’s Original, where they ate burgers and fries. “Being with Billy was so easy,” Ms. Tarantino said. “I could have hung out and chatted with him all night.”
“We talked about politics, how we were both raised in religious Catholic families and what we wanted from life,” Mr. Peeker said. “We were totally in sync.”
They stayed until the restaurant closed, and when Mr. Peeker invited Ms. Tarantino over, she didn’t hesitate to say yes. There, on his living room couch, with the main lights off and the galaxy lights projecting across the room, they kissed while “A Groovy Kind of Love” by Phil Collins played in the background.
The next day, a Saturday, they texted nonstop and made plans to meet that evening, again at Mr. Peeker’s apartment. They watched the horror movie “Swimfan,” drank beers and traded jokes.
They got together again on Monday — this time at Ms. Tarantino’s apartment — where she cooked him a dinner of salmon steaks. They saw each other almost every day from then on.
Ms. Tarantino, 37, grew up in Huntington, N.Y. She is a sales manager at Rewined Candles in Charleston. She has a bachelor’s degree in marketing and advertising from Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
Mr. Peeker, 38, is from Wading River, N.Y. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps for four years and is a supervisory program specialist at the Department of Veterans Affairs at Ralph H. Johnson V.A. Medical Center in Charleston. He holds a bachelor’s degree in human resources from Charleston Southern University and a master’s degree in management, strategy and leadership from Michigan State University.
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The couple fell into a cadence of meeting up at a brewery or restaurant every day after work and set a goal to visit as many of Charleston’s more than 30 breweries as possible, collecting a pair of pint glasses from each. Mr. Peeker became Ms. Tarantino’s unofficial tour guide to Charleston and the surrounding area.
The two also indulged their interest in movies with marathon nights watching several in a row. “It took watching ‘American Psycho’ for the first time to realize where half of Billy’s sayings came from that I hadn’t yet picked up on,” Ms. Tarantino said. (One of them: telling her he had to return videotapes anytime she asked him if he wanted to have dinner.)
In January 2022, a year after they met, Mr. Peeker moved into Ms. Tarantino’s apartment, and two years later bought a home in Huger, S.C., a Charleston suburb.
Mr. Peeker proposed in March 2025 during a weekend trip to Savannah, Ga., while they were sitting on a bench in the city’s Chippewa Square, the setting of a scene from “Forrest Gump,” a film they both enjoy. “Billy told me after that he wanted to get down on one knee, but he couldn’t because he had so many knee injuries from serving in the Marines,” Ms. Tarantino said. “It was very us to sit side-by-side anyway.”
A year later, on March 21, they were married before 247 guests at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Charleston. Deacon Frank Kurre of Notre Dame Parish, in New Hyde Park, N.Y., officiated, with the Rev. JohnBosco Ikemeh, a Catholic priest, participating in the ceremony.
In a nod to the song they listened to on their first date, they shared their first dance to “A Groovy Kind of Love.”
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