Our Story
march 6, 2019
FIRST ENCOUNTER
March 6, 2019.
Andréa was moderating a panel in the city that Ray and his friends organized. Andréa was on stage holding it all together, and Ray was somewhere in the back with his boys, smiling at everybody and greeting guest.
We weren’t looking at each other like that. Couldn’t, we were both in other chapters then. But there was something about that day that must have stuck, like a bassline you don’t realize is in your head until years later.
She clocked him as too friendly. (He was.) And he saw her as that girl from the Bronx who could cut through the noise with one look. Afterward, we went back to our lives.
For a while, we’d see each other in passing. Openings. Talks. A nod in a crowded room. Quick hellos, nothing more. Then New York did what New York does—it kept us moving, orbiting, until the city decided it was time for another collision.
ODE TO BABEL, AUGUST 2021
SECOND ENCOUNTER
And then there was that Brooklyn night.
Two summers later and the city had finally let itself breathe again. Covid was finally behind us! Everybody was outside. Ode to Babel was spilling out onto the sidewalk,loud, sweaty, and beautiful.
Ray was there on some birthday vibes, moving through the crowd easy, laughing with his people. Andréa was dancing with her girls, the kind of night where the city feels like it’s holding you. And then it happened eyes locked.
He didn’t rush it. Just watched her from across the room, let the night stretch out. When the DJ slowed it down and people started spilling back onto the street, he finally made his way over.
“Hey” he said, low and certain. “You remember me?”
And she did.
From there it was like picking up a conversation that had been waiting. Talking. Laughing. More talking. Like the city had just been holding this moment for them.
When it was time for her Uber, he said, “Come wait at my spot, it’s right around the corner.” That’s when she met Ace, his dog, his shadow. She crouched down, hand out, and Ace leaned in like he’d known her forever. Ray stood there watching, and something in him just… settled. Not fireworks. Not a movie. Just easy.
Her car came, they swapped numbers and for a while it was just little texts here and there, nothing serious. Until Fashion Week rolled around and she hit him up for an event.
This time, he wasn’t casual.
“You tryna grab dinner before we go?”
She said yes.
And after that, the city changed. Dinner turned into nights, nights turned into weekends. Suddenly every block had a memory. Every corner, a trace of the two of them, building something that felt like it had always been waiting to happen.
DECEMBER 31, 2021
IT BECAME OFFICIAL
march 31, 2024
Almost three years had passed since Andréa and Ray first decided to build a life together, back when it was just the two of them in that Park Slope apartment, figuring out how to share space, share pace.
By then, they had found their rhythm. Two people learning each other the way you learn a language: with patience, with respect.
So when Los Angeles came calling—a new job, a chance to stretch out in another kind of light—there was no hesitation. They had always been good at saying yes to what’s next.
But Ray had a different kind of yes on his mind.
While they packed up their little Brooklyn world, boxes in corners, plans scribbled on the backs of receipts, he was on the phone, quietly pulling Andréa’s family into the room. Her grandfather. Her mother. Her father. One by one, asking for their blessing. One by one, no hesitation.
He waited until the very last full day before they were set to leave New York. He chose a place that had been hers long before him: the Museum of Natural History—that big, echoing building on Central Park West where her grandfather had worked, and where her mother had worked too. A place that had, in its own way, raised her.
And in the museum’s new wing—the Gilder Center, awash with soft golden light—he stopped. Dropped to one knee with the kind of calm that only comes when you already know the answer.
She said yes.
In that moment, with all the ghosts of her childhood looking on, New York gave them its blessing too. And just like that, what started in the city turned into something bigger.
THE PROPOSAL
Now, Andréa and Ray are fully settled into their life in Los Angeles, a new rhythm on the other coast. And as they look ahead, they’re ready to celebrate the next chapter of their story in Mexico City—a place they both love, a city that mirrors so much of what they cherish about New York while holding a rhythm and color all its own. It feels like the perfect midpoint between Los Angeles and New York, a gathering place for the people who shaped them in both cities.
For Andréa and Ray, nothing matters more than the community that has carried them—the friends, the family, the people who have been part of every step of their story. They hope, with everything, that you’ll be there in Mexico City to share this moment with them.