Jerald Jerard Creer and Kent Michael Williams chalk up the almost 15-year delay in becoming a couple to a struggle to communicate — one that had nothing to do with Mr. Creer’s Deafness.
Since June 2009, when the two met on a Carnival cruise ship, Mr. Williams had been texting Mr. Creer every few weeks asking for dates. Mr. Creer routinely turned him down. For years, Mr. Williams assumed it was because of his age. “Jerald told me when we met I was too young for him,” Mr. Williams said. (Mr. Creer is seven years older.)
The truth was more complicated.
The friendship that Mr. Williams, now 42, and Mr. Creer, 49, struck up while sailing from Miami to the Bahamas had obstacles from the start. Mr. Williams, an engineer at Cox Communications then living in Baltimore, was traveling alone. Mr. Creer, a social worker, teacher for deaf people and actor then living in Suitland, Md., was vacationing with his boyfriend. Both were part of a group of L.G.B.T.Q. people of color vacationing together.
Mr. Williams remembered seeing Mr. Creer outside the ship’s nightclub a day or two into the trip and feeling drawn to him. “He’s fine,” he recalled thinking.
But he didn’t know Mr. Creer was deaf, which resulted in a stilted conversation. Mr. Creer, who considers American Sign Language his first language, can read lips and make out sounds when wearing his hearing aids. But he struggles to decipher spoken words in dim lighting and loud environments.
“From time to time, I don’t know if my hearing counterparts are adjusting to being in conversation with me,” he said of the stiltedness. That was the case with Mr. Williams. Then, there was the matter of Mr. Williams’s social anxiety. “I’m shy and introverted,” he said. “I’m still trying to figure out why I would have gone up to Jerald in the first place.”
Only two things were clear to both by the time the vacation was in the rearview mirror: One, each found the other attractive. And two, “Kent was very, very shy,” Mr. Creer said.
Mr. Creer grew up in Richmond, Va., with five younger siblings. His parents, Pamela Smith and Jared Creer, discovered his deafness before his first birthday.
By middle school, he was attending events for the deaf community in Rochester, N.Y., where he moved to attend a private school. There, he found his first deaf role models: Rosalie Rockwell, who was a teacher at the school, and her husband, Dale. Both have since died.
“They told me about N.T.I.D.,” he said — the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, a college at Rochester Institute of Technology that trains deaf and hard of hearing students for tech careers, where Mr. Rockwell was a science professor.
At first, Mr. Creer was skeptical: “No one in my family ever went to or finished college.”
But at N.T.I.D., where he enrolled as a scholarship student in 1994, the world opened up. “I met deaf people of all races,” he said. His freshman year, he joined the Ebony Club, a campus group for deaf Black students, but quit because he felt he wasn’t intellectually on their level. Shirley J. Allen, a retired R.I.T. professor and the first Black deaf woman in the United States to earn a doctoral degree, pulled him aside and told him, “Don’t you ever give up.”
Mr. Creer earned two degrees from R.I.T., the first a bachelor’s in his double major, social work and performing arts. Years later, he finished a master’s degree in education. He now works as a drama and theater arts teacher at the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf in Clarkston, Ga.
Mr. Williams grew up in Baltimore with his parents, Darlene Winslow and Kent Williams Sr., two younger half sisters and a cousin he considers a third sister. At 17, he started college at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Md., to study computer science. But at the time, he was struggling to come to terms with his sexuality. After a semester, he dropped out.
“I had attempted to kill myself,” said Mr. Williams, who was raised Christian. “Growing up in the church, I thought I was going to hell anyway.” (Mr. Creer said that he also attempted suicide during college for similar reasons and survived his depression with the help of his friends from theater, a creative outlet he had been pursuing since early childhood.) Instead of returning home to Baltimore, Mr. Williams moved to Dunnsville, Va., where his godmother lived. To support himself, he worked a series of retail jobs.
In 2003, after three years in Virginia, he returned to Baltimore and got an apartment with a friend and eventually a customer service job at Verizon. By 2009, he was ready to return to college, later earning a bachelor’s degree in information systems from the University of Maryland. In 2010, he moved to Atlanta.
The boyfriend Mr. Creer took the 2009 cruise with broke up with him shortly after they returned home to Maryland. Mr. Creer moved back to Rochester, where he started working as an ASL coach and teacher for deaf people. Heartbreak was nothing new to him, though for years he had tried to avoid it by dating older guys. Men his own age or younger “just wanted to play,” he said. “I didn’t like that.”
Mr. Williams made a promise to himself to keep in touch with Mr. Creer after the cruise, though the odds of an eventual romance, he knew, were against him. He didn’t know ASL, and it was hard to keep up with Mr. Creer’s relationship status. But he remained in the grips of an enormous crush. “I never stopped being attracted to him,” Mr. Williams said. “I made it very clear.”
He did so by texting Mr. Creer at least once a month, letting him know about travel plans and where and when he hoped they might be able to meet in person. Mr. Creer always answered, but usually with an excuse. “He would say, ‘No, I don’t think so, I can’t take the time off,’” Mr. Williams said. “I would say OK and continue to be cordial.” But occasionally they did meet up in cities like Washington, D.C.
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“I’d meet him for a local event or for dinner at some restaurant,” Mr. Williams said. Those visits sometimes turned romantic before they said good night. But Mr. Creer’s pattern of declining his invitations would soon pick up where it left off. “I figured, it is what it is,” Mr. Williams said. “You enjoy what you can get sometimes.”
In December 2023, Mr. Williams made plans to celebrate a friend’s birthday in Manhattan and asked Mr. Creer to meet him there, not realizing that New York is one of Mr. Creer’s favorite cities. In less than a day, Mr. Creer responded, “I’ll be there.”
“I was like, Oh my God, for real?” Mr. Williams said. “I was really happy.” Nervous, too.
At the DoubleTree by Hilton in Times Square, the two stayed up all night playing a conversational card game that Mr. Creer had brought, the couples edition of (The And) card game.
“It was so thought-provoking,” Mr. Creer said. “We answered questions like, What are you hesitating to tell me? What are you afraid of?” Both say they fell in love that night. “We understood each other in ways we hadn’t before,” Mr. Creer added.
That weekend, Mr. Williams finally understood Mr. Creer’s reluctance to accept his scores of invitations through the years. Mr. Creer’s reservations about dating younger men were real. “I was aiming for mature men who understood the struggle of life and who know what it takes to sustain a long-term relationship,” Mr. Creer said.
But there was something else, too. “Kent often goes on trips that I couldn’t afford,” he added. “I was a social worker and was embarrassed that I couldn’t go, either because of my schedule or because of money.”
At the end of the New York birthday celebration, Mr. Williams was ready to carve a path forward as a couple. “‘Are we dating exclusively?’” he asked Mr. Creer. “Jerald said, ‘I think we should. I’m going to make a point of investing in you.’”
Two weeks later, in January 2024, they met in Manhattan a second time. In March, they traveled to London for a friend’s wedding. By then, they were discussing living together in Atlanta. But not marriage. So it was a surprise when Mr. Creer proposed to Mr. Williams at the top of the London Eye Ferris wheel. “It was total disbelief,” Mr. Williams said. His yes brought tears to both.
“I’m deaf in a hearing world, and I’m signing all the time, but Kent doesn’t see me as different from anyone else,” Mr. Creer said. “I love his heart and his compassion and his generosity so much.”
Mr. Williams added, “I fell in love with how genuine he is, the heart that he has. He will do anything in his power to make someone else happy, even at the risk of making himself unhappy.”
In June, Mr. Creer moved into Mr. Williams’s home in Atlanta. On Feb. 28, 115 guests gathered at Kimball Hall in Roswell, Ga., for their wedding, which was officiated by Romell Parks-Weekly, a friend, an L.G.B.T.Q. activist and a pastor at the Sanctuary, a Christian church in St. Louis. Both men were escorted down the aisle by their parents.
The ceremony included two ASL interpreters and a rendition of John Legend’s “All of Me,” both sung and signed for guests. Mr. Creer and Mr. Williams exchanged rings and promised to love each other “today, tomorrow and forever.” Once they were officially married, they jumped a broom decorated with ribbons and rhinestones into the first moments of that forever.
On This Day
When Feb. 28, 2025
Where Kimball Hall, Roswell, Ga.
Bliss and Harmony In the weeks leading up to the wedding, Mr. Creer took to Instagram to express his feelings about Mr. Williams in a series he called “word of the day.” Each day, he taught his followers a new word in ASL, including “forever” and “commitment.” Mr. Williams, who avoids the camera because of his shyness, reluctantly agreed to be part of the “romance” post on Valentine’s Day.
… And Comfort (Food) At a reception after the ceremony, guests helped themselves to a buffet with Southern favorites, including barbecued chicken, beef brisket sliders and mac and cheese. For dessert, after the grooms cut a small wedding cake, red velvet and chocolate cupcakes were passed around.
Bon Voyage The day after the wedding, the couple set sail on their second cruise together to the Caribbean. This time, they shared a cabin.
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