Our Story

When Dani and I were first set up in June of 2011, timing wasn’t exactly on our side. Every attempt to plan a date seemed to fall apart. I thought she wasn’t interested.

What I didn’t understand yet was who she really was: a devoted mother, daughter, sister, and aunt who always put family first, especially during difficult times. But somehow, fate kept nudging us back toward each other.

After all the failed attempts at setting a date, I decided to try a new approach and be spontaneous. I called her up and asked what she was doing at that very moment.

Thirty minutes later we met at Hudson Grille in White Plains. She warned me she’d only wait 15 minutes if I was late.

I wanted to test her patience because for the rest of our lives she’d need a lot of it. So I walked in 14 minutes late.

And for some reason that I still don’t know, she waited.

That night we talked for hours and discovered all the invisible threads that had connected our lives long before we officially met. We had spent years crossing paths without realizing it: same places, same stories, even the same preschool for our children.

Then came the moment that should have told us this was meant to be.

Dani shared a story about a bouncer she once told to "go f@@k yourself" after he joked that she was finally 21 years old.

That bouncer was me.

By the end of the night, neither of us wanted the conversation to end.

That summer, before she left to take her boys to Italy and I left to take mine to Ireland, I told her something I already knew in my heart was true:

And from that moment on, we were…