Shawn Matthew Miller wasn’t looking for love when he traveled to New York City in May 2019 — he was hoping to land a job.
He had flown in for an interview at BuzzFeed for a senior learning specialist role, and out of curiosity, he decided to dip his toe into New York’s dating scene by perusing the gay dating app Scruff.
That’s where he found Ivan Henry Gilkes.
Mr. Gilkes happened to live a block away from where Mr. Miller was staying in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
After messaging on the app, they decided to meet in front of Have a Bagel in Williamsburg, then took the subway into Manhattan to do some shopping. They ended up spending the next three days together — people-watching in Washington Square Park, watching “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and having lunch at the now-closed Fette Sau in Brooklyn. Neither was looking for a serious relationship, but after Mr. Miller, 36, returned to Tempe, Ariz., where he was living at the time, the two kept in touch almost daily.
Mr. Miller didn’t get the job, but he left New York with something better: a budding long-distance relationship with Mr. Gilkes. To see if their connection could go deeper, the two planned to meet in San Francisco in September 2019.
“It was romantic-esque before we met in San Francisco, and San Francisco was to see if it could be romantic fully,” Mr. Gilkes, 38, said.
The trip did not go as planned. The restaurants they planned on visiting were closed. One restaurant that had gotten rave reviews was wildly disappointing. The night before they were supposed to leave for a trip to the Redwoods, the car they arranged to rent through the peer-to-peer car-sharing service Turo was stolen. Navigating travel hiccups together proved a good omen.
“I’m definitely the more structured person in the relationship — I had plans and itineraries,” Mr. Gilkes said. “Shawn made me feel like we could just pivot and solve together.”
The pair visited one another several times before Mr. Miller received a job offer as a training implementation specialist with Benjamin Moore and moved to New York in the second week of March 2020. Though they were finally both in the same city, the Covid pandemic presented new challenges.
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“We were screen to screen for so long, and now we’re in person and we’re quarantining together,” Mr. Miller said. “It was not easy.”
To broaden his social circle, Mr. Miller used the app Bumble BFF to make friends so he wouldn’t have to rely solely on Mr. Gilkes. “I had him, but he couldn’t be my whole social life.”
As the world reopened, Mr. Miller and Mr. Gilkes’s relationship expanded. They started visiting all of New York’s gay bars and moved in together to Mr. Miller’s apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in October 2023. They adopted a practice of checking in with one another every Saturday.
“It’s our dedicated space to check in with each other to make sure that we’re OK, that we don’t have anything that we need to discuss or if there’s anything that we want to celebrate,” Mr. Miller said.
The topic of marriage came up early in their relationship. “There were a lot of silly comments about, ‘I’m going to marry you’ things very early on,” Mr. Miller said. “I was like, ‘Let’s get married.’ And this was like a month in. He’s like, ‘OK.’ And he said that he would wear a yellow suit.”
The second week of December 2024, Mr. Gilkes proposed to Mr. Miller in Washington Square Park, where they had their first date, with a white gold ring from VRAI. About a month later, at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Mr. Miller gave Mr. Gilkes a gold and platinum band from Mociun.
“I had told Shawn that he can’t propose to me because I’m really contrarian,” Mr. Gilkes said. “And if he had asked, I would say no, just because I would feel like it’s not on my timeline.”
Mr. Miller, who is from Portsmouth, Iowa, is a technology learning and communications trainer at Allen Overy Shearman Sterling, a law firm based in New York and London.
Mr. Gilkes, who grew up in Southern California’s Inland Empire east of Los Angeles, owns Floral Studio by Ivan, an event florals studio based out of New York that he started in December 2024. He holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture history and urban design studies from N.Y.U.
The two were married on March 28 by Julia Muell, one of Mr. Miller’s cousins who was ordained by the Universal Life Church for the event, at the Georgia Room at the Freehand hotel in Manhattan, before 75 guests. For the ceremony, Mr. Gilkes wore a daffodil-yellow suit from the Ghanaian-American designer Samuel Boakye’s label Kwasi Paul and Mr. Miller wore a navy blue suit by the designer Thom Browne. For the reception, Mr. Gilkes changed into a red suit by the same designer.
While planning their wedding, tulips emerged as a significant symbol for the couple.
“Early on in the pandemic, when we would just go on walks, tulips were blooming everywhere,” Mr. Gilkes said. He wasn’t able to be in a flower shop because of the pandemic shutdown, so during their walks, he would show Mr. Miller how to reflex tulips, a floral technique where their petals are bent back to create a fuller bloom. Tulips, especially the Leo variation, featured prominently in Mr. Gilkes’s floral designs, presented both as pairs and in groups.
“I wanted it to be showing two people being bonded together,” Mr. Gilkes said, adding that the larger arrangements were symbolic of “community being bound together, our friends and family coming together.”
Kasia Pilat, a social media editor for NYT Cooking and the Food section, reports on a range of topics and has published recipes.
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