Samantha Hope Smith and Aaron Jamal Davis weren’t looking for love when they met at a New Year’s Eve party in 2019. She was happily in a relationship; he was fresh out of a breakup and taking a pause.
Still, they struck up an easy conversation. “I thought Sam was funny and really cute,” Mr. Davis said.
“Aaron was really nice,” Ms. Smith said, “and I liked how he was dancing all night.”
At the time, Ms. Smith was working as an intensive care unit nurse in North Charleston, S.C., and renting an apartment nearby. Mr. Davis worked in engineering at a paper mill and lived in Murrells Inlet, about 90 minutes away.
After that evening, they followed each other on Instagram but didn’t reconnect until October 2020, when they matched on Tinder. By then, Ms. Smith was single, and Mr. Davis had moved to Mount Pleasant, just outside Charleston.
“I forgot how good-looking he was,” Ms. Smith, 31, said.
They messaged for a few weeks, sharing jokes and interests. Mr. Davis, 29, eventually asked Ms. Smith on a date, and they met on Halloween for drinks and a game of pool at My Father’s Moustache, a pub in Mount Pleasant.
“I’m pretty good at pool, so I was super confident,” Ms. Smith said. “Aaron failed to tell me he used to be in a pool league, and he beat me pretty bad.”
As they drank beers and played a few rounds, they laughed and chatted.
They stayed in touch in the weeks that followed. One evening, they shared pasta and desserts at Indaco, an Italian restaurant in Charleston. On another, they binged the television series “New Girl” on Ms. Smith’s living room couch, and mid-episode shared their first kiss.
Their relationship became long distance in December when Ms. Smith became a traveling nurse. “We texted and talked a lot when I was away and spent practically every minute together when I was back in Charleston,” she said.
Mr. Davis also visited Ms. Smith. He flew to places like Salem, Ore.; Hanover, N.H.; and Louisville, Ky. “Being apart made us closer,” he said.
They spent their time together sharing their favorite pastimes. Mr. Davis, an avid fly fisherman, took Ms. Smith on excursions in the tidal creeks near Charleston and in Montana’s Gallatin River in Yellowstone National Park.
Ms. Smith, a voracious reader, persuaded him to read along with her so they could discuss the books. “The Martian,” a science fiction novel by Andy Weir, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s nonfiction work “Between the World and Me” ranked high on their list.
Both hiking enthusiasts, they hit trails in Franconia Notch State Park in New Hampshire and Snoqualmie National Forest outside Seattle, and filled their downtime with wine tastings and live music at neighborhood bars.
One of Ms. Smith’s assignments, in the summer of 2021, took her to Everett, Wash. On her days off, she explored Seattle, about 40 minutes away, and quickly fell in love. “I liked the lifestyle, how walkable it is, and how good the public transportation is,” she said.
When Mr. Davis visited her there, he felt the pull, too. One afternoon, they walked through Pike Place Market and paused to watch the sunset. It was then, they said, that they realized they wanted to make the city their home together.
Ms. Smith, who is from Salem, Ind., now works as a surgical nurse at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. She holds a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Indiana University Southeast in New Albany, Ind.
Mr. Davis, who grew up in Columbia, S.C., is an automation engineer working remotely for Zeta, an engineering company based in Lieboch, Austria. He has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
By summer 2022, Ms. Smith had given up travel nursing, took an I.C.U. position in Charleston and moved in with Mr. Davis at his home in Mount Pleasant.
But they kept their sights set on Seattle, returning often for long weekend visits. In September 2024, they took what they called “the plunge” and settled into a home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.
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Mr. Davis continued to work remotely, while Ms. Smith found her job at Harborview.
Mr. Davis proposed in October 2024 in front of the Inn at the Market, a hotel in Pike Place Market. It was a spot where he had often taken photographs of Ms. Smith during their visits.
“This time, he asked a stranger to take a picture of us together,” she said. Mr. Davis then got down on one knee and proposed.
The couple wed before 90 guests on Jan. 30 at the Court in the Square at Europa Events, a venue in Seattle. Patrice Holmes, Mr. Davis’s great-aunt, who was ordained by the Universal Life Church, officiated.
The reception was black-tie, with guests asked to wear tuxedos and black dresses. The newlyweds shared their first dance to an instrumental version of Bill Withers’s “Lovely Day.”
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