Before Emily Nicole Wiser and Griffin Edward Lear ever met, their lives had already begun to overlap.
Unbeknown to either of them, their parents had been friends in college.
Years later, when Ms. Wiser told her parents she was dating a man who had graduated from Dartmouth, she anticipated her father’s reaction. “I knew my dad would be excited because he is also a Dartmouth grad, class of ’87,” Ms. Wiser said, adding that Mr. Lear’s parents were also Dartmouth grads — his mother in the class of ’86 and his father in ’83.
After connecting the dots, Ms. Wiser’s father and Mr. Lear’s mother realized they had known one another in college.
But that wasn’t the only moment of serendipity in their love story.
In July 2019, Ms. Wiser and her best friend, Elliana Graham, moved from Chicago to San Francisco to start new jobs after college. Months before moving, Ms. Graham posted about it on social media.
An old friend from high school who lived in San Francisco commented that he’d love to show them around. That old friend was Mr. Lear, who had seen Ms. Wiser on Ms. Graham’s social media posts.
“When El and I were in college, she would post funny videos of me on Snapchat. Griffin saw those and mentioned I was cute and funny,” Ms. Wiser said.
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When Ms. Wiser and Ms. Graham arrived in San Francisco, Mr. Lear invited the two of them to a party at his apartment in the city’s Richmond district. The invite inspired a fleeting thought, Ms. Wiser recalled thinking, “Maybe I’ll meet my future husband.”
Interestingly, Ms. Wiser wasn’t the only one who had that thought. She noted that a family friend who had known Ms. Wiser since she was a child had told her the same thing as she was helping her to pack for her move to San Francisco.
And on July 12, 2019, that prophecy came to fruition.
“I opened the door and saw Emily and thought, oh my God, that’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Lear said. “I hope I get to talk to her tonight.”
They chatted all night. “Just learning everything we could about each other,” Mr. Lear said.
The two exchanged phone numbers and, for the next few weeks, they would hang out in group settings with friends.
In August 2019, they were finally able to connect one on one when they drove together to meet up with friends after work. “We were in the car for an hour and time flew by,” Ms. Wiser said. “It was a shock to me how much I enjoyed being with this person.”
Mr. Lear felt the same and decided that “the natural next step was to ask her out.”
By October, while having lunch at Burma Superstar, a Burmese restaurant in San Francisco, they “talked about everything and nothing,” Ms. Wiser said. “It was a magic blur.” Shortly after, neither could deny their connection, and they began dating. But less than six months into their budding romance, Covid took hold.
They began spending weeks at a time with each other’s families: skiing in Lake Tahoe, spending time at her parents’ home in South Carolina and at Mr. Lear’s family lake house in Vermont, where they would fish daily.
Five years later, when Mr. Lear began planning the proposal, he knew a fishing trip in Vermont would be the perfect cover.
On March 21, 2025, on a windy afternoon with temperatures below 30 degrees, they stood on the shore as the wind blew their fishing lines out of the water, “I told Griffin, ‘I think we should try again later,’” Ms. Wiser said.
But Mr. Lear convinced her to hang in there a little longer. “I know there are some big fish out there,” she recalled him saying.
Minutes later, Mr. Lear said he got a nibble. Ms. Wiser watched in surprise as he pulled up a hook with a diamond ring on the end. “I was caught completely off guard,” Ms. Wiser said. “I later learned the ring on the hook was a cheap Amazon copy — the real one was safe in his pocket.”
Ms. Wiser, 29, is a wealth management client adviser at Bernstein Private Wealth Management. Born and raised in Cincinnati, she holds a bachelor’s degree in public policy from the University of Chicago.
Mr. Lear, also 29, is the head of warranty programs at Extend, which works with retailers to provide product protection. He has a bachelor’s degree in government from Dartmouth College and was born and raised in Manhattan Beach, Calif.
On May 27, 2024, the couple moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where they continue to live.
The two were wed on April 11 at Silverado Resort in Napa, Calif., surrounded by 200 guests. Mark Stecher, a friend of the bride’s family who was ordained through Crossroads Church in Ohio, officiated.
Ms. Wiser wore the wedding dress her mother wore in 1991, and her mother’s mother wore in 1956. And they were able to replace the missing buttons with buttons from her paternal grandmother’s dress, which were, as fate would have it, a perfect match.
The post Before They Met, Their Parents Had Already Known Each Other appeared first on New York Times.
