Sarah Kristine Wood moved to Barcelona, Spain, in February 2022 to live her dream.
“I had a strong feeling I needed to be in Barcelona,” said Ms. Wood, 27, who had studied there in college. She grew up in Brighton, Mich., and left her high-pressured job on the trading floor at Goldman Sachs in New York behind. “I had a conviction I would have a Spanish husband.”
That March, she matched with Gustavo Adolfo González Leal, 32, who was born in Caracas, Venezuela, on the Bumble dating app, and “pre-warned” him that she was both a vegan and gave up alcohol a year earlier.
He was unfazed. “Those two things were not a problem,” Mr. González said. “That requires a lot of commitment, not to fall into social pressure.”
But, storm clouds quickly gathered once he let slip that he lived in Madrid. (He had added Barcelona in the app’s vacation mode for a potential trip.)
“I’m not interested in long-distance,” Ms. Wood said.
She graduated with high distinction with a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Michigan, and works remotely as the chief operating officer of Truth Arts, a start-up technology entertainment company based in Miami, and as a freelance lifestyles writer.
Mr. González asked her to meet him for coffee (he doesn’t even drink coffee) while he visited a friend in Barcelona that weekend, firming-up the trip with her in mind.
“She was super, super interesting,” he said, and judging from her profile and photos, “beautiful.”
Mr. González, who has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, received a master’s degree in finance from Afi Escuela in Madrid. He is now an associate on a strategy team for J.P. Morgan Private Bank in Edinburgh, Scotland.
“He called my bluff,” said Ms. Wood, and sent him her phone number.
She told him she could spare an hour tops at a cafe before dinner with a friend.
“He was wearing a navy peacoat, and was strikingly handsome,” Ms. Wood said. “I remember it in slow motion.”
She did not catch that he ordered tomato juice in quick-fire Spanish. She thought it was a Bloody Mary and an odd choice at a cafe. They laugh about it now.
Instead of an hour, they stayed three.
“I’m sorry I’m so late,” she later told her friend, “but I think I’m going to marry him.”
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
They met again for coffee (he ordered hot chocolate) the next evening, and then she walked him to the Barcelona-Sants train station.
“He called me Sarita, my dad’s nickname for me,” she said, in a text during his two-and-a-half-hour trip back to Madrid. (Her father, born in San Jose, Costa Rica, grew up in Mexico City.)
Two weeks later he asked to see her again in Barcelona.
“Do you want to meet in Paris,” she asked jokingly, explaining she would be speaking on a panel at a technology conference for work.
Mr. González took the offer seriously, and booked a flight.
“It was a risky move,” he said, but he took his brother’s advice: “‘What’s the worse thing? You have a trip to Paris.’”
In early April, Ms. Wood welcomed him to Paris around 11:30 p.m. with a lentil burger at her hotel near Montmartre. He then headed to a hostel, not his style, but affordable hotels were full.
They met for lunch the next day. Afterward, their hands met while sharing an umbrella in the rain. Later, they had their first kiss.
“We walked the entire city,” he said, during their stay.
Later that month, he spent two weeks with her in Barcelona. She then spent two weeks with him in Madrid in May, and met his family at a barbecue on his sister’s rooftop, with vegan lasagna made especially for her.
“It got very serious, very fast,” he said. In June, when they visited New York for her birthday, he met her parents, who drove in from Michigan, and he happily spoke Spanish with her father.
By the end of June, Mr. González moved into her apartment in Barcelona, where he cooked arepas from scratch, usually filled with avocado or hummus for her, and cheese and ham for him. (She is no longer vegan.)
“I got to know him and I loved him more,” she said. “He’s so funny and so international.”
In August, they spent a couple of weeks at her family’s cabin on Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho. Mr. González, who loves fishing, caught a couple of trout with her old Barbie fishing rod.
In March 2023, they moved to Edinburgh for his job at J.P. Morgan. That October, during a trip to Majorca, Spain, he proposed on a mountaintop overlooking the ocean.
In New York, on March 28, Yanfang Chen, an officiant at the Manhattan City Clerk’s office, led an intimate ceremony at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau. Later, they celebrated at Frank’s House, an event space in a brownstone in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn with 27 guests enjoying a Venezuelan menu of arepas, tequenos, fried yuca, and tres leche cake.
“I dreamed of a Spanish husband,” Ms. Wood said. “I have a Spanish-Venezuelan husband in Scotland.”
