As someone who worked in public relations, Elise Audie Nikolaisen was amazed by Bailey Wright Carlin’s “ability to make things go viral,” she said, on the social media platform then known as Twitter.
Celebrities like Chrissy Teigen would comment on his posts. The website Delish even reported on a fruit-throwing debate that he began online.
So Ms. Nikolaisen, who was working for a public relations and marketing firm in St. Louis at the time, sent him a direct message on May 13, 2020, seeking some professional advice on viral posts. He said that he would be available for a call two days later.
He called her during an 11-hour drive from New York City to Mooresville, N.C., to visit his parents. The call lasted for three hours. “It was very sweet and great timing,” Mr. Carlin said. “I told my parents in North Carolina that I just talked to someone incredible.”
When Ms. Nikolaisen got off the phone, she said she remembers thinking, “he was exactly the kind of person I wanted to marry — completely himself.”
A short time later, Ms. Nikolaisen sent Mr. Carlin a text with her Instagram handle. She explained that she was mostly a “lurker” on Twitter, now known as X, and that it would be better if they communicated via text or Instagram.
“And then I added him on Snapchat,” she said. She began sending him what she called “flirty” messages on the app — and yet, “he was not picking up what I was putting down.”
“She is the most beautiful girl I have seen my life,” Mr. Carlin, 29, recalled thinking at the time. But, he said, “me being an older professional and she being a person who came to me for professional advice, I just put that aside.”
This didn’t stop Ms. Nikolaisen, 25. “I knew he was a book nerd,” she said. “So I texted him for a book recommendation.” He sent her a copy of “Normal People” by Sally Rooney.
“Then we started texting nonstop,” she said.
“She was being cutesy and flirty,” Mr. Carlin said, adding that, gradually, “I kind of reciprocated.”
A few weeks later, Mr. Carlin, who grew up in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. , flew to St. Louis, her hometown, for their first date. “I was in a blind panic,” he said. “I had never gone farther than Manhattan for a date.”
The two spent the weekend at the Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark and left the hotel only to stroll around nearby Forest Park.
They had their second date 11 days later, in late August 2020, in what was Ms. Nikolaisen’s first visit to New York. “We strolled around Bushwick, visited Times Square and walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and through Central Park,” Ms. Nikolaisen said, adding that she fell in love with the city. Hours into the visit, Mr. Carlin told her that he loved her. The visit lasted four nights.
They kept in touch regularly after that. “We were not officially dating during this time,” Ms. Nikolaisen said, though “it was really only distance keeping us apart.”
In late February 2021, Ms. Nikolaisen landed a job at the public relations firm Stuntman, based in New York. “Bailey immediately started increasing communications” she said.
She moved to New York on May 1, 2021. By the end of the month, they were a couple. In November, she moved in with Mr. Carlin and his three roommates in Bushwick. A year later, the couple bought a condominium in the same neighborhood.
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On Jan. 9, 2023, he asked her to come look at the sunset on the terrace of their apartment. After taking a container of popcorn out of her hand, he asked her to marry him. She was so excited, she forgot to say yes at first.
Ms. Nikolaisen is now an associate vice president of Hawkins International, a FINN Partners Company, a public relations firm in New York specializing in luxury travel. She has a bachelor’s degree in women’s and gender studies from St. Louis University.
Mr. Carlin is the founder of Bad Brain Digital Consulting, a digital media agency. He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the State University of New York, Plattsburgh.
The two were wed on June 8 at the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by Samuel Koppelman, a mutual friend of the couple ordained by American Marriage Ministries for the occasion. Forty-two guests attended.
“It was truly the most unbridled happiness I can ever remember feeling,” Mr. Carlin said.
When Ms. Nikolaisen and Mr. Carlin were dating long distance, they “wrote love letters back and forth — the old-fashioned way,” Ms. Nikolaisen said. To honor that, the couple hand-wrote letters to all of the guests. “That brought a lot of really sweet tears and meaningful moments,” she said.
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