mini-vows
Dan Shear and Nora Tillmanns started their third date with a concert, and it continued all weekend with multiple meals and meeting her friends.
Daniel Paul Shear stopped at a red light in North Hollywood, Calif., in 2017 long enough to snap a photo of the Idle Hour bar, a building in the shape of a whiskey barrel, to send to Nora Charlotte Tillmanns.
“I’m a native Angelino and I love fun design,” said Ms. Tillmanns, 32, who got his attention a few days earlier on the Bumble dating app. Both appreciate Los Angeles architecture and are fans of programmatic, or novelty, architecture, buildings mimicking their use.
When she casually mentioned that she and two friends were about to see the wildflower blooms in the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, he created a mini-guide for her that included trails and even the best parking spot.
“This guy seemed funny, interesting and cute,” said Ms. Tillmanns, who graduated from Sarah Lawrence. She received a law degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and now works in Los Angeles as an employment counsel at the Fox Corporation, the media company based in New York.
On Easter Sunday, 10 days after their initial encounter on Bumble, they met for drinks at Terroni, a few blocks from where they each lived at the time in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles.
“‘Oh, he’s so great, what a mensch,’” she recalled the two women bartenders, who knew him as a regular, saying. “They were gushing. I was a little smitten.”
Mr. Shear, 41, who graduated from Vassar, is to join Loren Bouchard, the creator of the animated series “Bob’s Burgers,” in July to form a production company in Burbank, Calif. Until February, Mr. Shear was the executive vice president for comedy development at Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming service, where he oversaw original comedy series including “Girls5eva.”
During that date, drinks turned into dinner — a tomahawk steak for two at the bar. Later, as he walked her home (her parents lived across the way), they slipped into the backyard of a vacant house out of view for a first kiss.
Ms. Tillmanns, working on an intense trial as an associate then at Jones Day, got away for dinner with him the next Saturday in Koreatown, and then a couple of weeks later for their third date, a Magnetic Fields concert at Royce Hall at U.C.L.A.
“That date didn’t end,” he said. “It was one of those full weekend affairs with multiple meals and we met some of her friends.”
In June 2018, she moved into his Spanish-style courtyard apartment, and they built a daybed for the porch, upholstered with a tropical banana leaf fabric (They recently bought a 1920 Craftsman bungalow in the Melrose section of Los Angeles).
“I definitely felt that she was someone I can do anything with and wanted to do everything with,” he said.
In December 2018, at the start of a 10-day road trip that zigzagged the entire state, he proposed in Fern Canyon in the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park in Humboldt County, a backdrop in the film “Jurassic Park.”
“Is this a good time to talk about our future?” he asked, and got down on one knee with a ring he had reset that once belonged to her “bubby,” or grandmother, on her mother’s side.
They were set to marry in April 2020 at Temescal Gateway Park in Pacific Palisades, Calif., with 150 guests, but put those plans on hold because of the coronavirus.
They waited until his parents, brother and sister-in-law, who is expecting, could safely join them from New York. The bride is taking the groom’s name.
On June 5, Rabbi Michelle Missaghieh, also the rabbi at the bride’s bat mitzvah, officiated in the bride’s parents backyard in Los Angeles, before 40 guests, with a huppah her father built and a jazz trio. The couple then celebrated with a honeymoon in Bora Bora.
