Eat, Drink, and Be Married
JEANNE + TOM
We met
in Rochester while working together at Kodak. We were married to other people but were great friends — double dating, going out, watching each other’s kids. Eventually, we drifted apart, as couples do when raising a family.
Our paths crossed 15 years later while at a singles golf club event that Tom stumbled upon by chance. Embarrassed that I was going through a divorce, I said it was just a party. As it turned out, he was going through one too. That was the start of it.
We began golfing together regularly. One day we got rained out, went to the bar and had everybody thinking we were cheating on our spouses because we told them we were married, but not to each other. That may have been our first date.
We moved
here five years ago as an unmarried couple. During a social security seminar, Tom learned the tax benefits of married people, and suddenly he looked at me and said, “So will ya?”
We're a couple of clowns and tease a lot. I kept asking him, “Are you marrying me just because of taxes or do you really love me?”
We married
in 2018 when there were lots of benefits to being married, relative to getting older and one person dying and all that kind of stuff. It was more of a legal thing and didn't change the way we behaved.
The only one who knew was my 7-year-old granddaughter.
The day before the wedding we took our best friends who were visiting, on a boat ride and brought our homemade Irish cream. We called it “Eat, Drink, and Be Married.”
We wore blue jeans and married in front of this great big old tree in the back of the polo field, with an old dilapidated trellis that we decorated.
It was a blast!
