“You look like fun,” Julie Ann Mollo wrote in her first message to her future husband. “Are you an Anthony or a Tony?”
“Never a Tony,” replied Anthony Michael Verderame. Somehow it was the perfect call and response. They messaged on Hinge, where they first connected five years ago, and texted every day after.
A week into their correspondence in October 2019, Mr. Verderame still hadn’t asked Ms. Mollo out. “I usually only give guys one or two days,” she said. So when he still hadn’t made the request, “I said, ‘You should ask me out.’”
So he did, and they planned a date at the Great Georgiana, a bar in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
Mr. Verderame had since shaved the beard he was sporting in his Hinge photos. “She kept telling me I looked like John Belushi,” he said. “So, I thought it was over.” But his impression changed when she suggested a second drink.
“He was super cute,” said Ms. Mollo, who happens to be a fan of John Belushi. The connection quickly became clear. They talked for hours. He walked her home. Then, Mr. Verderame said, “I smooched her.”
The next morning, he texted, “I may or may not have an extra ticket for this band we both love.” He had to tell his best friend, Christian Marshall, he was no longer going. The two went to see Saves the Day at Elsewhere in Bushwick a week later.
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The invitation proved consequential. “I told my friend he had a ticket and he said, ‘Marry this guy,’” Ms. Mollo said. That second date was a smashing success, and, after three months of dating, they made their relationship “official” at midnight on New Year’s Eve 2019.
In August 2022, Mr. Verderame moved into Ms. Mollo’s apartment in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, where they currently live.
Ms. Mollo, 36, is the “designer and head bag lady,” she said, at her namesake accessories and lifestyle brand based in Brooklyn. She once designed costumes for Katy Perry, grew up in Grafton, Mass., and holds a bachelor’s of fine arts in fashion design from Pratt Institute.
Mr. Verderame, 39, is a freelance video editor and colorist. He grew up in Delran, N.J., and has a bachelor’s degree in communications from the College of New Jersey.
On Jan. 1, 2023, the two agreed they would be engaged by the end of the year. On Dec. 15, Ms. Mollo said, when he asked her to go have ice cream, “I was like, ‘Are you going to propose?’”
“I said, ‘Not this year,’” Mr. Verderame said. The truth was, he was waiting for the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve.
Two weeks later, on Dec. 30, their dog woke them at 5 a.m. to go out. Ms. Mollo couldn’t go back to sleep and Mr. Verderame asked her why. “I’m mad at you,” she recalled saying to him. “You promised we’d be engaged.”
“‘You don’t even have a plan,’ she said to me,” Mr. Verderame said. “And I said, ‘Oh, I don’t have a plan. This is how you want this to happen?’”
He took the ring from the night stand, got down on one knee, and proposed. “5:57 a.m. we were fighting, and 6 a.m. we were engaged,” Mr. Verderame said. “We had champagne and went back to sleep.”
The couple knew from the start that they didn’t want a big affair, so they had two engagement parties — one in New Jersey and one in Massachusetts — hosted by their families.
They were married by Wanyi Mai, a clerk at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau, on Oct. 2, the same day Ms. Mollo’s parents were wed in 1983. Ms. Mollo’s best friend, Sarah Loken, and mother, Lisa Mollo, as well as Mr. Verderame’s parents, Catherine and Vincent Verderame, were in attendance. (Ms. Mollo’s father, John Mollo, died in 2018.)
Dinner at Freemans on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with 16 guests followed.
Instead of a ring, Mr. Verderame had a heart and arrow doodle — Ms. Mollo’s company logo — tattooed on his ring finger a week earlier.
“My friends spent the day trying to scare me about how much it would hurt, but I don’t think I even flinched,” Mr. Verderame said with a laugh. “I’m really very happy with how it came out, and I haven’t taken it off since.”
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