About nine months passed between Daniel Bertram Grossman and Danielle Bluma Garonce’s first date and their wedding at City Hall in New York.
While their romance was a whirlwind, it had a slow start and a lot of pining from afar. The first time Mr. Grossman saw Ms. Garonce was in March 2024 at an event called Bar Bene at the Garibaldina Society, an organization that promotes Italian culture in Los Angeles. (Ms. Garonce considers herself an Italophile and Mr. Grossman is friends with the event organizer.)
“She’s beautiful and so alive and laughing and has this vitality and energy to her,” Mr. Grossman recalled thinking.
Despite his interest, he didn’t approach. Several weeks later, in June, Mr. Grossman and Ms. Garonce were both at a private film screening in Los Angeles when a friend introduced them. Though they chatted, Ms. Garonce did not have romance on her mind.
“I was turning 40, I was very happy in my life, and I’d done a lot of thinking around who and where I was,” she said. “I knew of Daniel because I’m very good friends with his ex-fiancée. I saw him on her Instagram during Covid, when they were baking sourdough and growing vegetables, and I always thought of him as her fiancé who grows eggplants.”
Ms. Garonce, 40, was born and raised in Montreal. She earned a professional cooking diploma from the Quebec Institute of Tourism and Hotel Management and a bachelor’s degree in art history from McGill University. In 2011, after working as a chef in Montreal, she decided to move to Los Angeles for better weather and “the California dream,” she said. She began working as a producer for Wondros, a creative agency that develops marketing campaigns for organizations and individuals making positive social change.
Mr. Grossman, 43, was born in New York City, where he lived until he was 9, when he and his family moved to San Diego. He has a bachelor’s degree in literature and creative writing from Bennington College in Vermont and a master’s degree in film from Columbia. He works as a producer of commercials and independent films, and in 2022, he founded Woop, a start-up that sells vermicompost soil (“a probiotic for soil made by worms,” he said).
In December 2025, Mr. Grossman was visiting his ex-fiancée, Jade Healy, in Los Angeles. The two had ended their engagement in April 2021 and remain close. “She was always trying to set me up,” Mr. Grossman said. After naming a few potential candidates, she asked him what he thought of Ms. Garonce.
“I said, ‘She’s single?’ And she said, ‘I think she is,’” Mr. Grossman said. “It was like the pants you’ve been wanting just went on sale. I had to act fast.”
He sent Ms. Garonce a direct message on Instagram, suggesting a date. After she responded that she was still dating someone, he asked her to let him know if anything changed.
Not long after their exchange, Ms. Healy also messaged Ms. Garonce.
“I told her, ‘this is how great Daniel is,’” Ms. Healy recalled. “‘He likes the outdoors, he likes cooking, he’s tall and handsome, and he’s my ex-fiancé, which is a pretty good reference.” She added, “I was mostly messaging to say, ‘don’t think this is weird.’”
“It was a message like, ‘Hire my nephew for an internship,’” Mr. Grossman said.
A few months later, in early April, Mr. Grossman was in Cambridge, Mass., when Ms. Garonce reached out to let him know that she was single again.
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Mr. Grossman had moved across the country to work on Woop at the Engine, an incubator and accelerator for sustainability-focused companies at M.I.T. He made the decision after the trailer he’d been renting in the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates burned down along with most of his belongings in the Palisades Fire in January 2025.
He asked if Ms. Garonce could meet the next time he’d be in Los Angeles. On April 20, they went for dinner at Saffy’s, a Middle Eastern restaurant in East Hollywood.
“I don’t think she was taking me seriously as a long-term prospect,” Mr. Grossman said. “It wasn’t like meteors crashing. She was like, ‘Wait, you live in Cambridge?’ She felt confused.”
After three hours of conversation, he drove her home and they shared “a modest kiss,” Mr. Grossman said.
Because Mr. Grossman was only in Los Angeles for two weeks, they decided to see each other again soon.
“We started seeing each other at a tempo we wouldn’t ordinarily have,” Mr. Grossman said.
“The more time we spent together, the more we started moving other plans and making time for each other,” Ms. Garonce added.
The evening before Mr. Grossman’s flight back to the East Coast, Ms. Garonce said she wouldn’t be able to see him because the next day she was running 11 miles as part of her training for a half marathon and wanted to prepare by carb-loading and resting.
“Friday morning, he called me and said, ‘Hear me out, I’d like to come to your pasta, and I will leave you alone at 9 o’clock,’ ” Ms. Garonce said.
In the end, Mr. Grossman stayed at Ms. Garonce’s place until 5 a.m.
“By the time I left, it was irrational and insane, but I thought maybe I should stay longer,” Mr. Grossman said. “The Uber was outside, and I thought, this was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”
“You read about this kind of thing, but in our 40s, this had never happened to us,” said Ms. Garonce, who still ran the 11 miles.
They hatched a plan to meet in New York, where some of their family members live, a few weeks later. In the meantime, they stayed in regular contact, and Ms. Garonce made a mix of her favorite songs by the Grateful Dead for Mr. Grossman. He was so enthralled by the music that he attended the Dead & Company residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas with a friend the week after Ms. Garonce had gone.
When he arrived at his hotel, a Grateful Dead T-shirt, a postcard and a $25 poker chip were waiting for him at the reception, all gifts from Ms. Garonce.
“This girl is amazing,” Mr. Grossman remembered thinking.
On the way from the airport, he sent her a long, “very earnest and vulnerable” text expressing his feelings.
“It was beautiful,” Ms. Garonce said.
On May 18, Mr. Grossman drove down from Cambridge to Park Slope, Brooklyn, where Ms. Garonce and her mother, Julie Mayman Garonce, were visiting her brother, Jonathan Garonce, and his family.
“He sent his Google Maps location, and my heart was pounding,” she said.
In the two free hours she had before a nephew’s recital, she and Mr. Grossman bought sushi and ate it on a stoop, then went to Prospect Park.
“We were making out like teenagers,” Mr. Grossman said.
When Ms. Garonce sat down next to her mother at the show, she told her that “something very, very serious” was happening.
“That night, I called him, and he was like, ‘I think we should meet up tomorrow,’ and we ended up spending 10 days together,” Ms. Garonce said. “We went running in Central Park, met each other’s friends, biked together.”
In the months that followed, they went camping in California’s Big Sur, spent the summer together driving around the East Coast, and went on a two-week trip to Japan. When Ms. Garonce brought her dog, Roman, to Cambridge, Mr. Grossman spent hours driving around to buy him the right bed and the low-phosphorous food he needed because of kidney issues. When Mr. Grossman had a rash from poison oak, Ms. Garonce convinced a dermatologist in Cambridge to see him on very short notice.
“I haven’t had a lot of people look after me and I haven’t trusted a lot of people to look after me,” Mr. Grossman said.
In July, Ms. Garonce and Mr. Grossman went into business together, becoming partners and executive producers at Hug Studio, which Mr. Grossman co-founded in 2023. Previously, Hug Studio focused on content creation for large corporate clients; now, Ms. Garonce and Mr. Grossman are also working for start-ups, nonprofits and NGOs.
Through it all, Mr. Grossman and Ms. Garonce have remained close with Ms. Healy, the former fiancée.
“I met Daniel and Danielle around the same time, and there’s a reason for that somehow,” Ms. Healy said. She believes, she said, that “Daniel and I were together to help each other prepare for our next partners.” (Ms. Healy became engaged on Christmas.)
Mr. Grossman proposed during a hike in Griffith Park in Los Angeles on Dec. 13, at the same spot where he and Ms. Garonce had shared a kiss on their third date. Afterward, they celebrated with a meal at Madeo Restaurant in Hollywood.
Wanting to get married as soon as possible, Ms. Garonce and Mr. Grossman found the earliest wedding date that would work for them and their families.
“We want to start a family relatively soon, and we wanted to do this first,” Mr. Grossman said.
They were married on Jan. 30 at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau by Guohuan Zhang, a city clerk. Ms. Garonce and Mr. Grossman decided to have the ceremony in New York because it was where they fell in love. Their guests were Ms. Garonce’s parents and her brother, and Mr. Grossman’s mother, Kathryn Grossman.
“It was fast, but also extremely emotional,” Ms. Garonce said.
One major highlight was sharing it with so many other couples at the Marriage Bureau. “The grooms and the brides are all nodding at each other, like, ‘you love each other?’” Mr. Grossman said. “‘We love each other, too.’”
On This Day
When Jan. 30, 2026
Where Manhattan Marriage Bureau
After-Party After the ceremony, Ms. Garonce pulled on her winter boots, and the group went for lunch at Doubles, a private club where Mr. Grossman’s mother is a member. Because of the weather, the usually full dining room was mostly empty, Mr. Grossman said. “That made it feel like it was just for us.”
Dressing for Cold Mr. Grossman wore a navy suit that he’d left for years at his mother’s apartment, since most of his clothes burned in the fire. Ms. Garonce opted for a vintage Versace dress — without tights, upon the advice of her seamstress.
Chill Evening After lunch, Mr. Grossman and Ms. Garonce stayed in a suite at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, where Doubles is located. “It was so cold,” Ms. Garonce said. “We were like, we’re not leaving anywhere.” So they settled into Harry Cipriani in the lobby and had martinis.
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