His Second Try at a Good First Impression Did the Trick

He didn’t. Instead, he got her interested enough to agree to a weekend with him at Mohonk Mountain House, a resort in New Paltz, N.Y., a few weeks later.

When Ms. Richard-Nagle, who lived in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, arrived at his Chelsea apartment for the road trip, she made note of his luggage. “He packed in bags from the grocery store,” she said. “I thought, OK, this guy is not taking himself too seriously.”

Mr. Quinn said it “was love at first sight” with Ms. Richard-Nagle. She fell in love with him at Mohonk. “He was handsome and smart and funny,” she said.

In the fall of 2019, she moved into his place in Manhattan. The following March, after the pandemic set in, they relocated to Mr. Quinn’s childhood home in Salt Point, N.Y., where they now live full-time. (His parents had moved to Naples, Fla.)

By the summer of 2021, Mr. Quinn was ready to propose. But before doing so, he wanted to ask her parents, who live in Paris. He also wanted to be discreet, but at the cottage the couple had rented for the season in Montauk, N.Y., privacy was hard to come by. “When I would have client calls, I would go sit in the car,” he said.

When he rushed to the car to take a return call from her parents on a Sunday that July, Ms. Richard-Nagle became suspicious. After he hung up, she asked who he had been talking to and he told the truth. “I started to cry,” Mr. Quinn said, and with her parents’ blessings secured, “I proposed.”