Wilson Grad Conn wasn’t about to let his dating inexperience become an issue when he started seeing Rachel Lyn Honig in the fall of 2019.
Rookie mistakes, he knew, were inevitable. But at 55, he felt he had the life skills to get started quickly, and that he had met a woman worth living. “When I found Rachel, I knew she was right for me,” he said.
He hadn’t believed in love at first sight, but he became one.
Ms Honig, 51, and Mr Conn, now 58, both lived in Manhattan when they swept right in April 2019. That they didn’t meet until October is down to an excessive case of jitters. Mr. Conn, whose name is Grad, had moved to the Upper West Side from Seattle, where he had been Chief Marketing Officer of Microsoft America, in 2018 in an effort to rekindle a faltering first marriage.
“That failed spectacularly,” he said. His ex-wife returned to Seattle soon after, leaving Mr. Conn, who had been married to her since 1987, alone in an unfamiliar city.
Most of his waking hours were spent on a new job as chief experience and marketing officer at the software company Sprinklr. But in the spring of 2019, he was also ready to lay the foundations for a new social life. He and his wife, who have two daughters, Myrna, 28, and Trinity, 25, were legally separated. “We started thinking about divorce,” he said. “I thought, I need to go out and meet people.”
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When he downloaded Tinder, “I wanted to meet someone who was focused on a passionate romantic relationship.” He estimated that he scrolled through thousands of faces before matching with Ms. Honig, who became the first and only woman he met online. A more remarkable statistic: she became only the second woman he had ever kissed.
Ms. Honig is a psychotherapist in private practice in Manhattan. When she met Mr. Conn, she was living in Midtown and running Amplify Cooperative, a marketing communications consultancy she founded in 2013.
Like Mr. Conn, she had been married before; she divorced in 2006 after five years of marriage. Unlike him, she had no children and knew her way around dating apps. “I’ve tried many,” she said, including the rare Farmers Only from Manhattan. In her 14 years of dating after the divorce, she estimated that the total number of men she communicated with had exceeded 3,000. She has personally met hundreds of them.
Mr. Conn’s profile photos on Tinder, including one with his DeLorean, came across as “a little goofy,” she said. Also, “he had his first and last name on his profile. Nobody does that.” However, the full name made it possible to Google it, which helped her get a more complete picture of the man who had started messaging her for dates but failed to follow up.
“I knew his professional background, I knew the company he worked for,” she said. She loved both. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have been so patient with his apologies, including one he texted from London hours before they were due to meet in New York. “It was like, come on, buddy. You are on another continent.”
Mr. Conn canceled four dates with Ms. Honig before asking his assistant to make sure he attended an appointment scheduled for October 4. “She literally pushed me into the elevator,” he said. “My legs were so stiff they wouldn’t bend.”
Mrs. Honig had invited him to a screening at New York’s Paley Center of an episode of “West Wing,” followed by a question-and-answer session with series creator Aaron Sorkin. She threatened to stop communicating with him if he canceled. “It was worded strongly,” he said. “It was effective.”
He knew he was in love when they went for a drink at the 21 Club before the event. But when they said goodbye at 1 AM, the feeling wasn’t mutual. “He didn’t offer to get me an Uber or even drive me to the curb,” she said. Mr. Conn now calls that “a bush league move.” Mrs. Honig, finding him sincere and sincere, nevertheless agreed to a second date.
On that date, 10 days later, she became his second ever partner for a passionate kiss. At her suggestion, he leaned forward during a walk along the East River. “I was shaking like a leaf,” he said. The result earned a mixed review. It was “strong potential, needs work,” Ms Honig said. Mr. Conn was happy to put in the hours it took to learn.
By mid-October, though it was a new venture for him, Mr. Conn showed a gift for romance. For a third date, at Bistro Vendôme, a French restaurant in Manhattan, he arrived with a beribboned robin’s egg blue box. Inside was a Tiffany & Company compass. An attached note read: “Thank you for helping me find my way.”
“Rachel literally instructed me” on how to be a boyfriend, Mr. Conn said. But he didn’t want to stay long.
Mrs. Honig grew up as an only child in Rockville Center, New York. Her mother, Patricia Honig, a librarian, died of throat cancer in 2002. Her father, Ronald Honig, is the owner of Ron Honig and Company, a carpet sales agency. In 1993, she received a bachelor’s degree in art history and ethics from Smith College. Last year, she earned a master’s degree in clinical mental health from Northwestern University.
Mr. Conn grew up in Toronto and Vancouver, British Columbia, with a younger brother and sister and graduated from Queen’s University in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in marketing. His mother, Genevieve Conn, is a retired high school French teacher. His father, Charles Conn, an advertising executive, died of pneumonia in April.
When he met his previous wife in college, “he was smitten and felt he had no reason to continue looking,” his mother said. That he felt the same way after a single date with Ms. Honig, she added, does not indicate impulsiveness or limited patience to play the field. “Grad is quite deep and very measured in what he does,” she said. Ms. Honig, however, was a jolt of instant chemistry.
Mrs. Honig wasn’t sure if it was healthy. In November 2019, she wondered aloud if by becoming his girlfriend she was depriving him of dating experiences that he could benefit from. But when she suggested he see other women, it was a hard no. “If you know, you know,” he said.
Six months into their relationship, when Covid started tearing through Manhattan, he suggested getting a marriage license in case one of them got the virus. “That was back in the days when you thought if your person was in the hospital you could sit with them,” Ms Honig said. “Grad had great foresight. He knew we would want to be there for each other.”
That license went unused and expired in August 2020. But the sense of rightness they both felt in getting it has never left them. Mr Conn, whose divorce was finalized in March 2020, has proposed twice. The first, on September 12, 2020, occurred during a nighttime hike on an island off the coast of Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where Mrs. Honig spends summers.
“Grad had carved our initials on the boathouse like other people do,” Mrs. Honig said. “We went to see that, and then he proposed to me under the stars.”
She said yes a second time when he proposed three weeks later, on the anniversary of their first date, while visiting Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, in Mill Run, Pennsylvania. The trip was meant to celebrate their mutual love of mid-century modern design.
The grand 325-person wedding they hosted Dec. 10 at the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport in Queens was also a tribute to mid-century modernism, but the date was chosen for another mutual passion: Christmas.
“Grad is known to count down Christmas as early as January,” Ms. Honig said. The couple now divided their time between Mrs. Honig’s apartment in Midtown; a house in Delray Beach, Fla., they bought together in 2020 to be closer to Ms. Honig’s father; a cottage on Long Island Mrs. Honig’s mother has left her; and Mr. Conn’s work residence in Houston. In May 2020, he left Sprinklr to become chief marketing officer at PROS, a software company based in Texas.
Both love the idea of eventually dedicating a yet-to-buy home exclusively to Christmas, with a tree up and carols playing all year round.
During the wedding ceremony, guests got a glimpse of what that could look like. Dozens of Christmas trees decorated with tinsel and ornaments that the couple asked their friends and family to bring in lieu of gifts were scattered around the spacious one-time air terminal. The scenery also included a Christmas-themed ice sculpture and a Grinch-inspired wedding cake. “The place was transformed into an absolute wonderland,” Ms. Conn said.
Mrs. Honig, carrying a pillbox and a custom wedding dress by Anne Barge with a jeweled belt, walked down a candlelit staircase with her father. Mr. Conn and his mother descended a flight of stairs on the other side while he was dressed in a Tom Ford tuxedo with a shawl collar. The cousin of Mrs. Honig, Marian R. Shelton, a retired New York State Family Court judge, met them at an altar strewn with festive greenery to officiate.
In handwritten vows, Mrs. Honig called Mr. Conn “a unicorn among men.” Mr. Conn thanked Mrs. Honig for helping him believe in love at first sight. After both repeated “with this ring I will marry”, proceedings took a break from Christmas when Mr. Conn stomped a glass, a nod to Mrs. Honig’s Catholic-Jewish upbringing.
With a cheer of “mazel tov!” from the crowd and the sleigh bells ringing in the distance, the pair sank through the terminal holding hands.
On this day
When December 10, 2022
Where The TWA Hotel, John F. Kennedy Airport
The most beautiful time Mrs. Honig’s wedding prep included a Christmas-themed Mani-Pedi. “Every bride should have snowflakes on her nails and candy cane toes,” she said. Her jewels for the ceremony include her late mother’s operatic pearls; Mr. Conn wore vintage TWA cufflinks, a gift from the bride.
Traditions Food stations at a reception desk in the terminal reflected both sides of Mrs. Honig’s background. One offered a turkey Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, the other Chinese food.
Unbroken The couple primarily hired women-owned wedding vendors. One, Israeli artist Talia C., made the glass Mr. Conn broke under his feet. After the wedding, the shards were collected. The artist will repurpose them into resin candlesticks for the wedding couple’s table.