A Leap Into Their First Marriage

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/fashion/weddings/a-leap-into-their-first-marriage.html

Version 0 of 1.

Before Rebecca Pomeroy McIntyre and David John Corrsin got married on Feb. 29, they came up with a couple of quips about why they chose leap day. Mr. Corrsin joked that he likes the idea of having to remember his anniversary only every four years. Ms. McIntyre declared that marriage is a leap of faith, so the day seemed fitting.

Neither Mr. Corrsin, 61, nor Ms. McIntyre, 62, had ever been married. To Ms. McIntyre, the concept always seemed like “a bad deal.”

“I’ve been asked a million times, ‘Why have you never gotten married?’” she said. “I can honestly tell you that I did an assessment, and I didn’t think it was a very good deal for women.” A close friend and neighbor, Jill Shay, has been hearing this line of reasoning for years. “She thinks it’s hilarious,” Ms. McIntyre said, but she was never kidding.

Ms. McIntyre is a trial lawyer at Sarrouf Law in Boston. Her cold-footed stance on marriage predates her first legal brief. “From an early age I felt this acute sense of not wanting to need a man,” she said. “Maybe it was a function of the times, but I always wanted to make my own way.” After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard in 1980, she earned a law degree from Boston College in 1985, also magna cum laude. In the early 1990s, she worked as an assistant attorney general for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. There, she helped win an $8 billion settlement in the state’s litigation against the tobacco industry.

Overachieving was as common as skinned knees in her childhood home in Dix Hills, N.Y. She grew up on a 75-acre parcel she called a family compound. Her paternal grandparents bought the property, surrounded by potato farms, in the early 1920s. Then her parents, Barbara Eckhardt McIntyre and Angus Philip McIntyre, and an aunt and uncle, Randall and Helen McIntyre, settled there. Ms. McIntyre was one of five siblings, and she had three cousins. “So there were eight of us running around,” she said. “We had horses and a swimming pool. We were all really close.” Expectations ran high: Mr. McIntyre, chairman of the family’s direct marketing company, O.E. McIntyre, “would give us little math problems at the breakfast table.” Three of the siblings went to Harvard. A fourth went to Yale and a fifth to Dartmouth.

If no one was surprised by Ms. McIntyre’s dedication to her career, almost everyone was surprised by her attitude toward marriage — most of all her mother, a former fashion writer for The New York Herald Tribune who now lives in Greenport, N.Y. (Ms. McIntyre’s father died in 2010.) “She always expected me to be the first to get married and have a whole bunch of kids,” Ms. McIntyre said. “Because I was very social and I loved people and I was always dating somebody. It was kind of a blow to her that I didn’t get married. There was a constant refrain of, ‘When are you going to get married? You’re going to lose your chance to have children.’”

Her mother’s disappointment weighed on her. But it was preferable, she thought, to caving to the pressure of committing to someone for life. Despite being single for so many years, Ms. McIntyre has rarely been lonely. Throughout law school, she lived with a boyfriend she met in college. And by the time she met Mr. Corrsin in September 1986, after the relationship with her law school boyfriend had ended, she was causing sparks to fly in multiple directions at the Boston law firm Palmer and Dodge, where both were new associates.

Mr. Corrsin was in his second week on the job that fall when he saw Ms. McIntyre in the elevator. He had just arrived at work after standing in line half the night at Fenway Park to buy Red Sox playoff tickets. “I was frowzy and unshaven and I get in the elevator, and there’s Betsy, coming back from lunch with three handsome men,” he said. The mood in the elevator was flirtatious, he said, and it was obvious the men wanted to date Ms. McIntyre. Both remember what she was wearing, a pink floral Belle France dress with a Peter Pan lace collar. “It was very ‘Legally Blonde,’” Ms. McIntyre said. “I thought it was appropriate lawyer-wear.”

Mr. Corrsin was less enchanted by the dress than the woman. “There’s a certain joy to Betsy,” he said. “She was laughing, she was fun, she was bright.” A few months into their careers at Palmer and Dodge, he asked her to dinner. Neither remembers how the date ended, but both remember what happened next: A disastrous weekend in Stowe, Vt., at Ms. McIntyre’s family’s ski house. Ms. McIntyre said she was “basically needled” into inviting Mr. Corrsin by a fellow lawyer who was playing matchmaker.

“It was like going from zero to 60,” she said. “I barely knew Dave and my parents were there, and he was very shy and it was just awkward.” Ms. McIntyre left Palmer and Dodge a few months later for a new job in New York. They didn’t speak for years.

[Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email.]

Mr. Corrsin was by then also content with being single. At Palmer and Dodge, he had been a corporate lawyer specializing in alternative energy. He is now an executive vice president, member of the board of directors and general counsel of Ameresco, a green energy company in Framingham, Mass. “Until recently, energy has been a very male industry,” he said. “You don’t meet a lot of women.”

His long-term bachelorhood didn’t have the same effect on his family that Ms. McIntyre’s single status had on her mother. “They were absolutely OK with it,” he said. His mother, Sonja J. Corrsin, had been a flight attendant for Pan American World Airways before becoming a copy editor at The New-Paltz Independent; Mr. Corrsin and his sister, Anne Clare Corrsin, grew up in New Paltz, N.Y. Sonja Corrsin died in 2015. His father, Lester Corrsin, was a scientist at Haloid Xerox Corporation and its successor, Xerox, and taught physics and computer science at Bard College. He died in 1995.

By the time Ms. McIntyre moved back to Massachusetts from New York to work as an assistant attorney general in 1993, both had put the awkward weekend in Stowe behind them. So much so that Mr. Corrsin barely recognized Ms. McIntyre when he saw her working out during her lunch hour at the gym in his law office’s building. “I thought, ‘That looks like Betsy McIntyre,’” he said. “Being a shy person, I had a large amount of trepidation about approaching her.” But when he did, she was delighted.

“This time, we were more mature,” she said. “The connection was stronger.” They started meeting occasionally for lunch. But after six months, the stars were still unaligned. “Dave had one foot in an old relationship.” Ms. McIntyre moved on.

Throughout the next decade, they kept in touch. “Every once in a while, one of us would pick up the phone,” Mr. Corrsin said. In 2005, they briefly dated again. This time, Ms. McIntyre was tripped up by lingering feelings for an ex. Six years later, in 2011, Mr. Corrsin and Ms. McIntyre both felt sufficiently single enough to try dating one more time.

They committed to each other so quickly neither remembers how it happened. “One thing I realized about Dave this time around was, I had always dated men who were competitive with me, and it brought out the worst in me and in them,” Ms. McIntyre said. “Dave was different. He was my biggest booster.”

For Mr. Corrsin, the simple accumulation of lived life made the difference. “I think you get to a certain point, and you appreciate how relationships work better. That’s the great compensation of getting older.”

In 2017, Ms. McIntyre’s assertion that marriage was a bad deal started slipping. That year, she said, “I think I asked him, ‘Where is this going?’” (His reply was a sarcastic “let’s not rush into anything.”)

Her long-delayed interest in marriage found reinforcement in her mother, now 91, who started enlisting friends and family members to drop hints to Mr. Corrsin that he should propose. “Betsy’s mom and I would get on the phone and say, What’s going on? Let’s get this going,” said Christie McNichol, who has known Ms. McIntryre since elementary school.” Barbara McIntyre also took the direct approach, secretly sending Mr. Corrsin a passel of emails urging a proposal. Her prodding was mostly in fun. “My mother’s a pistol,” Ms. McIntyre said. “Dave thinks she’s a riot.”

In February 2018, before they moved to a new apartment together in Cambridge, Ms. McIntyre and Mr. Corrsin designed an oval diamond engagement ring with two baguettes at a local jeweler. On July 24, 2018, after Mr. Corrsin had stashed the ring in a drawer for several months so that Ms. McIntyre would be at least a little surprised to see it again, he presented it at the Colony Club in Manhattan, where they were spending a long weekend.

His first attempt at a proposal, like their first few attempts at dating, didn’t stick. He ordered room service and, while Ms. McIntyre was in the bathroom, placed the ring box on the tray. “I served up the ring with the room service,” he said. “But then Betsy came out of the bathroom with toothpaste dripping out of her mouth and saw it. She said, ‘No, no — that’s not going to work.’”

For his do-over, he got down on one knee. “I was rolling my eyes,” he said. But then he said, “Betsy McIntyre, will you marry me?” He got the yes he was hoping for.

“I was thrilled,” she said, despite all the years of trepidation.

On Feb. 29 in Greenport, 80 guests gathered for their wedding at the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Greenport, N.Y., near Barbara McIntyre’s home. Ms. McIntyre, wearing an ivory crepe wedding gown with a bateau neck by Pronovias, walked down an aisle lighted by stained-glass filtered sunlight. Her brothers, Sandy and James McIntryre, escorted her; Sandy, who would later lead a recessional while playing bagpipes, wore a kilt. A bridal party included two sisters and two nieces wearing dresses made of McIntyre tartan sourced from Scotland. Mr. Corrsin, with two groomsmen flanking him, looked crisp in a simple black tuxedo. The officiant, the Rev. Roger Joslin, an Episcopal priest, began with a joke. The couple “entered into this union the way two lawyers might, with thoughtfulness and careful deliberation,” he said. “Maybe too much deliberation.”

After an exchange of traditional vows, during which Barbara McIntryre, seated in the front pew, could not contain an outburst of, “I’m going to cry,” the reverend pronounced them married.

“It’s sort of unbelievable,” said Cassandra Warshowsky, a friend who has known Ms. McIntyre and Mr. Corrsin since Palmer and Dodge. Still, Ms. Warshowsky and her husband, Jeffrey Colt, a groomsman, were not entirely surprised they finally took the plunge. “We’ve spent 30 or 40 years basting this. It’s been a slow pot. But in the end, you’re only ready when you’re ready.”

Where Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Greenport, N.Y.

When Feb. 29, 2020

At Home A reception was held less than a mile from the church, in stately Brecknock Hall at Peconic Landing, the retirement community where Barbara McIntyre lives. “Dave likes to joke that we got married in a retirement home,” Ms. McIntyre said.

Velvet, Not Tartan A sit-down dinner included entrees of herb-roasted chicken, teriyaki salmon and medallions of filet mignon, followed by a red velvet wedding cake.

The Classics A D.J. played rock and pop hits friends may have remembered from the couple’s Palmer and Dodge days, including “Under Pressure” by David Bowie and Queen. A first dance was to the Carpenters’s “We’ve Only Just Begun.”

Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.