On Nov. 23, 2019, Eleftherios Pericles Alexander Ipiotis was at Bar None, a now-closed sports bar in Manhattan’s East Village, watching an Ohio State vs. Penn State football game with friends. One of them asked if she could bring a friend of her own, Cailin Sullivan Cook.
“I said, sure, I haven’t seen her in about a decade, but why not,” said Ipiotis, who goes by Peri.
Both Ipiotis and Cook had attended Oyster Bay High School in Long Island, but he was two grades ahead of her, and their interactions never extended beyond a brief hello. “That night was the first time we were actually introduced,” Cook said. Furthermore, she added, “I’m a proud University of Alabama graduate, so I still joke that meeting at an Ohio State bar felt unfaithful to my Crimson Tide.”
The pair spent the rest of the evening catching up on the years since graduation and exchanged phone numbers. Ipiotis asked her out, and on Dec. 10, they met at the Stumble Inn, a sports bar on the Upper East Side, for their first date.
At the time, Cook wasn’t interested in dating, choosing to focus instead on her career, but Ipiotis was persistent. “Peri had an intense amount of patience and convinced me,” she said. “Our first date was there because it was low stakes — we just sat at the bar.”
What was meant to be a quick drink turned into hours of conversation, and they ended the night with pizza from across the street.
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They saw each other regularly in the following weeks, with Cook living on the Upper East Side and Ipiotis in Long Island City, Queens. “I knew after a month that she was the one,” Ipiotis said. “She had my full attention as no one had ever had before.”
Cook, 30, is a public relations manager for Burberry Beauty at Coty. She is from Oyster Bay, N.Y., and graduated from the University of Alabama with a bachelor’s degree in communication and information sciences.
Ipiotis, 32, also from Oyster Bay, is the business development manager at Island Photography, based in Port Washington, N.Y. He has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Ohio State.
During the early days of Covid, in the spring of 2020, the couple began spending weekends at Ipiotis’s family home in Montauk, N.Y., to get away from the city. “It gave us such a rare period of uninterrupted time together very early on,” Cook said. “Over time, Montauk became the place where our love was really solidified. It started to feel less like a getaway and more like home.”
One evening in May 2020, overlooking the ocean in Montauk, Cook opened up to Ipiotis about her father’s death when she was 13 and how it had affected her. “I felt for the first time in my life that I wasn’t judged by someone at all,” she said. “He brought back a version of myself that felt lighter and hopeful.”
“Those were deeper conversations than I’ve ever had with anyone in my life,” he said. “Those kinds of talks bond two people more than any of the good times — she’s helped me along the way, too. We would not be the same couple without it.”
In July 2020, they became official, and in July 2023, they moved in together in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Ipiotis proposed at Gin Beach in Montauk on July 26, 2024. They celebrated with sushi and champagne at the Inlet Seafood Restaurant, and later that evening, he brought her back to his family home, where their closest friends and family were waiting.
On June 13, they married at Montauk Lake Club and Marina in Montauk. Cook’s uncle and godfather, Victor Cook, who was ordained by Universal Life Church for the event, officiated the ceremony, with 180 guests in attendance.
The reception reflected Ipiotis’s Greek heritage through traditional Greek dancing and plate smashing. They also honored Cook’s father on the signature cocktail list with Bob’s Budweiser — his favorite beer.
Toward the end of the reception, an unplanned moment stole the night. Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” came on, and the couple found themselves on the dance floor, surrounded by their guests, and Ipiotis spontaneously picked her up and spun her around. “I’ve never seen so much elation on her face,” he said. “Her hands in the air, with her favorite song playing at our wedding, spinning around the room with everyone cheering for her.”
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