Philip Andrew Kuntz and Patricia Lynn Parent first met as neighbors across the street in Parsippany, NJ, when they were both three years old. “She wasn’t exactly the girl next door, but,” Mr. Kuntz said, “close enough.”
Kelly Craig Heflin and Carol Diane McNitt were well into adulthood when they met in a public garden in Edgewater, Maryland, in 2018. “Imagine walking through a park one day and meeting the woman of your dreams,” Mr. Heflin said.
On June 3, they all walked together on the Lumberville-Raven Rock Bridge that connected Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where the two couples had a double wedding about two years after their first double date.
While the quartet is more of a recent entity, the trio of Mrs. Parent, Mr. Kuntz, and Mr. Heflin has a history dating back to their time as students at Parsippany High School. Mr. Kuntz and Mr. Heflin have been best friends since they met there in 1976. However, Mr. Kuntz and Mrs. Parent were walking in different circles by then and were not as close.
The two grew even further apart after graduating in 1978. After high school, Ms. Parent and her Parsippany family moved to Fort Wayne, Ind., where she later met the man she would marry and raise two children before they turned 35. years of marriage ended in divorce in 2019.
By February 2020, Ms. Parent, 62, had started dating again. That month, she posted on Facebook about an admirer who had cut her ears off. A day later, Mr Kuntz, 62, surprised her with a text message. His eldest sister, Susan Rochelle, had seen Ms. Parent’s Facebook post and told him she was single.
Mr. Kuntz and Ms. Parent began catching up over the phone and then via video calls to Facebook Messenger. Ms. Parent, who at the time lived in Grandville, Michigan, learned that in 2019 Mr. Kuntz was also divorced — his second — and living in Rumson, NJ, with his twin sons, Liam and McDonagh, now 14.
Speaking to Ms. Parent, Mr. Kuntz said he was “so impressed with her spirit”. In the years leading up to her divorce, she had lost several loved ones. Her sister died of cancer in 2013. Two years later, her oldest son, Andrew, died at the age of 28 in 2015. (Her youngest son, Alex, is now 31.) And in 2016, she lost her father.
Mr. Kuntz, now a reporter at Bloomberg in Manhattan, had heard all about his sister. But discussing the losses with Ms Parent, a retired daycare nurse, brought her into sharper focus. “She’s a very positive person,” he said. ‘She’s inscrutable. She’s imperturbable.” In the spring of 2020, he had fallen in love with the woman he last saw in 2003, at their 25th high school reunion.
Mrs. McNitt, 54, and Mr. Heflin, 63, had developed an equally strong bond by then after meeting at the Historic London Town & Gardens in Edgewater, in August 2018.
Mr. Heflin, director of business development for BAE Systems Inc., the US arm of a global defense, aerospace and security company, lived in Edgewater. Ms. McNitt, a mental health psychiatrist at Luminis Health Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, lived in Crownsville, Maryland. Both were nearing the end of their long marriage and finalized their respective divorces the following year.
“Kelly was out for a walk with his two border collies and I was there to see the gardens and historic sites,” Ms McNitt said. “He saw me reading a historical plaque and we ended up chatting for 15 minutes.”
They didn’t exchange contact information before splitting up, but that didn’t stop Ms. McNitt from tracking down Mr. Heflin on LinkedIn that same night. Although she didn’t have his last name, she had enough information to put together that he was the same Kelly who was then working as a program manager at AT&T’s office in Columbia, Maryland.
Heflin said he was “completely shocked to reach out to her like that” — in a good way. “It was just incredible to get an invite on LinkedIn from her.”
“We probably sent each other 20 LinkedIn messages each” before exchanging email addresses, he added. “Carol and I may be the only people who have sent romantic texts on LinkedIn.”
Heflin, who has a son, Ian, 30, and two daughters, Alyssa, 28, and Cassandra, 25, described the couple’s early conversations as calm and easy. Mrs. McNitt, who has no children, felt the same. In addition, “I thought he was incredibly handsome,” she said.
The day after they exchanged email addresses, Mr. Heflin asked Mrs. McNitt on a first date and invited her to an auto show in Edgewater, where his 1967 Pontiac Firebird was on display. Then they went for a drink at the Pier Waterfront Bar & Grill, where they chatted for hours.
Within two months of meeting Mr. Heflin, Mrs. McNitt said, she had fallen for him; Mr. Heflin said he fell for her before. In August 2019, a year after they met, the two moved in together in a new home she recently bought in Crownsville.
When Mr. Heflin and Mrs. McNitt got engaged in September 2021, their first thought was that they would run away or have a five-minute wedding at the plaque in the garden where they met.
Then Mr. Kuntz came up with another idea. He and Mrs. Parent, who had moved to his home in Rumson earlier that year, had also decided to get married. So why not do a double wedding?
By this time, the two couples had chatted weekly since their first virtual double date in the summer of 2020, when Ms. McNitt and Mr. Heflin shared a screen in Maryland, Mr. Kuntz arrived from New Jersey, and Ms. Parent logged in from Michigan. For screen stability, they all bought the same iPad stand “so no one would get seasick,” said Mr. Kuntz.
In July 2020, Ms. Parent flew to New Jersey to visit Mr. Kuntz, and the foursome met in person. She and Mrs. McNitt soon developed a close friendship. “Patti is very easy to like,” Mrs. McNitt said.
When Mr. Kuntz suggested the idea of getting married together at an intimate event, the four quickly embraced it. But figuring out where to tie a double knot took more time.
Mr. Kuntz and Ms. Parent, who became engaged in November 2021, and Mr. Heflin, their fellow Parsippany High alumnus, were aboard for a small wedding somewhere near Mr. Kuntz’s New Jersey home. Ms. McNitt, who grew up in central Pennsylvania, had hoped to marry in her home state.
“Carol had no real connection to New Jersey,” Mr. Kuntz said.
When they identified New Hope, Pa., which is just across the New Jersey border, as a possible location, Mr. Kuntz recalled a wedding he had recently attended in the area.
During that trip, he had come across—quite literally—the Lumberville-Raven Rock Bridge, a pedestrian walkway over the Delaware River with one end in Delaware Township, NJ, and the other in Lumberville, Pa. Hosting a wedding on it meant that both couples could marry together, but in different states.
Seeing a photo of the bridge, which opened in 1947, Ms. McNitt immediately jumped in. “I was like, this is perfect,” she said.
In February, after the couples found their ideal location, Mr. Kuntz took their plan to Jodee Inscho, the director of community affairs at the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission. She signed off the location, only asking if they wouldn’t prevent pedestrians from crossing.
When they arrived on June 3, the brides and grooms gathered in the middle of the bridge in their wedding attire. “We carefully counted the doohickeys holding the suspension cables to determine the exact center so that Patti and I could get married on one end of that line and Kelly and Carol on the other,” said Mr. Kuntz. He and Mr. Heflin then played rock, paper, scissors to decide which couple would get married first.
In keeping with their shared desire for a simple, intimate ceremony, no guests were invited. Instead, about a dozen passers-by watched and witnessed, politely waiting for the wedding to end before crossing the bridge.
Mrs. Parent and Mr. Kuntz were married by James Waltman, the mayor of Delaware Township, NJ, on the bridge side in New Jersey. Mrs. McNitt and Mr. Heflin were married in a self-unifying Quaker ceremony presided over by Mark Baum Baicker, chairman of the Solebury Township Board of Supervisors, on the Pennsylvania side.
The brides and grooms each recited handwritten vows for both couples, declared married in about 15 minutes, left with their officiants on the Pennsylvania side, and walked to the Black Bass Hotel, in Lumberville, for a post-wedding drink.
Later, the newlyweds went to the Dubliner, a bar in New Hope. Hearing of the wedding, the bartender poured all four of them a glass of champagne, then strapped on a guitar and serenaded the newlyweds with the Temptations hit “My Girl.”
After spending their wedding night at a bed-and-breakfast in New Hope, Ms. McNitt and Mr. Heflin joined Ms. Parent and Mr. Kuntz at their home in Rumson, where the couples hosted a reception with 75 guests.
Reflecting on their marriage, Ms. McNitt said, “We were really just having fun with the four of us.”
On this day
When June 3, 2022
Where The Lumberville-Raven Rock Bridge connects New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Double happiness, double thanks Neither couple knew their officiant before coming out of the bridge plan, but both officiants welcomed their participation in the wedding. As a thank you, each official received a gift certificate from a restaurant on either side of the bridge.
borrowed something Ms. Parent was at least the fourth bride to wear a wedding shawl that belonged to her sister Kim London, who died in 2013. “My daughter-in-law and two of my nieces have also worn it,” said Ms Parent. “Everyone who has married since then has worn it. I kept it with me all day.”