When Jeffrey Adam Grossman and Karl Joseph Hinze messaged each other on the dating site OkCupid in May 2009, Mr. Grossman had reservations about Mr. Hinze’s age. “I was 26, and he was 20, which seemed slightly scandalous,” Mr. Grossman said. “I decided to keep talking to him because we had both answered what seemed like hundreds of questions, and the site promised that we would be a great romantic match.”
At the time, Mr. Hinze, now 36, was living with his parents in Yonkers, N.Y. It was the summer before his senior year at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., and he was interning with the now-defunct New York Musical Festival in Manhattan. Mr. Grossman, now 42, was living with a college friend in a two-bedroom apartment in Morningside Heights, a neighborhood in Manhattan, and gearing up to study at the Juilliard School.
Over the next week, the two exchanged flirty texts, and then Mr. Hinze asked Mr. Grossman on a date. “I had tickets to the comedy show ‘Mel & El: Show & Tell’ and asked Jeff if he wanted to go,” he said.
When they met outside a pizza joint on Ninth Avenue in Midtown, Mr. Grossman said he immediately noticed how “cute” Mr. Hinze was. Mr. Hinze was equally taken. “The top few buttons of his shirt were undone, which I found very attractive,” he said.
They ate a quick dinner at a diner, laughed through the comedy show and meandered through the streets afterward. Eventually, they parked themselves on a bench in Times Square and chatted for more than two hours about their lives.
Mr. Grossman is a classical musician who works as a freelance harpsichordist, music director and conductor. He is also the artistic director of the Sebastians, a baroque chamber ensemble in New York City, and a lecturer at the Yale School of Music and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He has a bachelor’s degree in music from Harvard and master’s of music degrees in conducting from Carnegie Mellon University and in historical performance from Juilliard.
Mr. Hinze is the director of product for White Whale Web Services, a technology firm based in Oakland, Calif., that serves colleges and universities. He has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and music from the College of the Holy Cross and a Ph.D. degree in music composition from Stony Brook University, New York.
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At nearly 1 a.m. on their first date, the two made their way to Grand Central Terminal so that Mr. Hinze could catch a train back to Yonkers. But before he went inside, they went to a secluded corner and kissed. “Right then, I knew that I had fallen hard,” Mr. Hinze said.
“I texted Karl while he was on the train, telling him that he was really special,” Mr. Grossman said. “I was completely smitten.”
They went on several dates that summer and had nightly phone calls. “We fell pretty quickly in love,” Mr. Grossman said.
In August 2009, Mr. Hinze returned to Worcester to finish his last year of college and Mr. Grossman began studying at Juilliard. They dated long distance. After graduation, Mr. Hinze moved to Stony Brook, and they continued to see each other from afar.
In the summer of 2013, the couple began living together when Mr. Hinze moved into Mr. Grossman’s one-bedroom apartment in Morningside Heights.
“It was obvious that we were going to be together for the long haul, but we had never formally discussed marriage,” Mr. Grossman said.
Once they moved in together, Mr. Grossman and Mr. Hinze began collaborating professionally. “We started teaming up to produce concerts for Jeff’s ensemble, which didn’t leave a lot of bandwidth to consider marriage seriously,” Mr. Hinze said. “Every year, we’d discuss it jokingly: ‘Is that what you want? Another event to plan?’”
In May 2019, on the 10th anniversary of their first date, Mr. Hinze told Mr. Grossman, “I just don’t want to forget to get married.”
“Right then, we knew that a wedding was in the cards,” Mr. Grossman said. “We just didn’t know when it would happen.”
Last year, they started planning their wedding, co-producing it like one of their shows.
On Oct. 19, Mr. Grossman and Mr. Hinze wed before 160 guests at the Angel Orensanz Center, an art and performance venue on the Lower East Side. The officiant was Christopher Caines, a friend of the couple’s and a choreographer who runs a dance company; he obtained a one-day marriage officiant license through the New York City clerk’s office.
The ceremony included readings of letters by the composer Benjamin Britten and the tenor Peter Pears. Mr. Caines choreographed the couple’s first dance, a mash-up of French Baroque music and the Betty Who pop song “All Things.”
“We laughed all day,” Mr. Grossman said. “In fact, we make each other laugh every day, and that’s how I know we’re meant to be together.”
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