When Lauren Aitchison and Thomas Alexander Kerr saw one another’s profiles on Hinge, neither imagined the other would be interested.
“I thought I’d be the wrong kind of quirky for Tommy,” Ms. Aitchison said.
“I’m very boring,” Mr. Kerr said. “Ninety-five percent of my wardrobe is black or white.”
But match they did in late December of last year. “We went right to voice notes on the app and then to voice notes on the phone,” Ms. Aitchison said. “We were so comfortable with each other straight away.”
On Jan. 2, Ms. Aitchison’s birthday, Mr. Kerr asked Ms. Aitchison to go out on Jan. 10. “‘That seems so far away,’” she recalled saying.
“I felt the same but I wanted to play it cool,” Mr. Kerr said. So he suggested coffee — “a predate date.”
“We had two dates in the diary before we’d even met,” she said.
They met on Jan. 5 at Square Park Coffee in Glasgow. “It was freezing that day,” Ms. Aitchison said. “We just chatted for hours.”
Ms. Aitchison, 36, was born and raised Alyth, “a tiny town” in Scotland. She earned a Higher National Diploma in journalism from Fife College. She works as a bank feeds technician for FreeAgent, an accounting software firm based in Edinburgh.
Mr. Kerr, 38, was born and raised in Glasgow. He earned a National Diploma from Glasgow Clyde College and works as a data center analyst in the East Kilbride office of Müller, a dairy production company based in Bavaria, Germany.
At the date’s end, “I awkwardly said, ‘I’m going to kiss you now,’” Ms. Aitchison recalled. “Tommy still says it to me sometimes before kissing me.”
On Jan. 10, the two had dinner at Mikaku, a Japanese pub in Glasgow that is now closed. Their third date followed five days later at Mr. Kerr’s apartment, where he cooked dinner.
That night, Ms. Aitchison recalled, “Tommy said to me straight away, ‘I’m old-fashioned and I’m not going to be seeing anyone else.’”
She liked how upfront he was. But having been previously married for a little over a year and separated five months earlier, she said, she was also a little scared. (Her divorce was finalized in September.)
But just two weeks later, she set that fear aside, and the two became official. “Tommy just kept soaring past every expectation I had,” Ms. Aitchison said. “It became very obvious very quickly that he was the one for me.”
Soon after, they decided they were going to eventually elope — in New York City. “I already did the big wedding,” she said.
“And I have a huge family, so it would have snowballed,” Mr. Kerr added.
Ms. Aitchison had been to New York twice before and “really fell in love with the history of the city.” Mr. Kerr was on board immediately.
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They settled on the first week in December to celebrate “a wedding, a birthday and a honeymoon,” said Mr. Kerr, whose birthday is Dec. 5.
“When we talk about it now, we have no idea how we got from becoming a couple to booking an elopement in the space of a month,” Ms. Aitchison said.
They hoped for a “proper” elopement, she said, but her “mum guessed immediately why we’d booked a holiday to New York.”
“‘I know my daughter,’” she recalled her mother saying. (Ms. Aitchison added that both her parents are “delighted.”)
Mr. Kerr formally proposed on Aug. 3. “We booked a really fancy hotel in Dornoch in the Highlands of Scotland and Tommy got down on one knee at the beach there,” Ms. Aitchison said. “He was so nervous that he forgot the whole speech he had planned and blurted out, ‘Please! It’ll be the best thing I ever do.’”
The two were married on Dec. 4 at the Manhattan City Clerk’s Office by Wanyi Mai, a city clerk. After the ceremony, they went to Ci Siamo near Hudson Yards for Italian food.
“It sounds very cheesy,” Mr. Kerr said, “but it’s a prime example of when you know, you know.”
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