Matthew Peter Casale’s efforts to impress his future wife began before they even met.
After matching on Hinge in September 2021, they messaged about their favorite books. “I’m a huge reader, and she is, too,” said Casale, 31. When Emily Brock Sherron, 29, shared her love for “A Visit from the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan, he bought and read the book so they could discuss it. “We were talking on the app for hours,” she said.
Both lived in the Norfolk, Va., area at the time. Casale was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, and Sherron was working on the re-election campaign of Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.). Their first date at Saltine, a seafood restaurant in Norfolk, confirmed the butterflies.
“I remember seeing him across the lobby and being like, ‘Oh,’” Sherron said. “I was immediately struck.”
As was Casale. “I walked through this big revolving door, and I thought, ‘This is the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen in my life.’”
Their first in-person conversation was careful and considered. “It wasn’t surface-level stuff. She wanted to understand what made me tick — what brought me to Norfolk, why I was in the military, what I aspired to,” Casale said. “I was head over heels immediately.”
They bonded, too, over their mutual yearning to return to New York City. Casale was born in Manhattan and raised in Ridgewood, N.J. He received a bachelor’s degree in history and economics from College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.
Sherron, who grew up in Houston, had earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Columbia.
“That was the best first date I’ve ever been on,” Sherron told a friend later that night. There was no fretting about seeing each other again. The following weekend, they went hiking, and within the first month, they had met each other’s friends and celebrated Sherron’s birthday. Just before Thanksgiving of 2021, he asked her to be his girlfriend.
Sherron, ever cautious, had a lot of questions first. “She wanted to know about my family, my political views, the role of religion in our lives, where I wanted to be, if I wanted to be in the military my whole career,” Casale said. He passed the interrogation, and their relationship was official.
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A turning point came in the fall of 2022. Sherron’s time with the Luria campaign was ending, and after spending Thanksgiving in Texas with Sherron’s family, Casale was deployed on a mission to the Mediterranean Sea. At one point, “he called me from the ship phone and I missed it. There’s 500 people on the ship and one ship phone,” Sherron said. “I was devastated.”
She made the spontaneous decision in her employment lull to go to Europe, meeting him at the Naval Station Rota in Spain. He took some days of leave, and they road-tripped across Andalusia and discussed taking the leap — in their careers and their relationship — to move to New York once his deployment was over. From Málaga, they FaceTimed with Casale’s brother to view an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In January 2023, they moved into that very apartment, together.
Back in New York, Casale earned an M.B.A. from N.Y.U. Stern School of Business. He now works as a consultant at Bain & Company. Sherron is the associate director for institutional giving at the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety.
It was on another European trip, this time to Austria with Sherron’s parents in December 2024, that Casale got the idea for his proposal. “We definitely had ‘The Sound of Music’ on the brain,” Sherron said. In February 2025, during a weekend in Stowe, Vt., they cross-country skied to the Chapel in the Woods at the Trapp Family Lodge & Resort. “I proposed inside this chapel in the woods on a 2–degree day surrounded by 10 feet of snow, and she said yes,” Casale said. “It was the most wonderful day of my life so far.”
Another happy day came on June 6, when they married at the Riverside Church in Morningside Heights, a church to which they belong and say they value for its progressive history. The Rev. Tim Dalton officiated before 180 guests.
The newlyweds cut their cake with a Navy sword, after which the dance party began in earnest. “It was just pure bliss from that point forward,” said the bride, who was lifted into the air, “Dirty Dancing”-style, in the wedding’s final moments.
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