On June 7, the skies were hazy and gray as smoke and ash billowed into New York from wildfires in eastern Canada. Despite the ‘end days are nigh’ gloom of the city, Deanna Marie Arthur and Grey Noah Cohen were strutting through the downtown streets in formal wedding attire — Ms. Arthur in an off-the-shoulder Jenny Yu gown and Mx. Cohen, who uses they/them pronouns and a gender-neutral courtesy title, in a gray tuxedo — and recording the rapidly darkening day with a hand-held video camera.
It was their wedding day. There was not much panic in the city when they walked out of the Manhattan Marriage Bureau after their 9:45 a.m. City Hall appointment, so afterward they went to Harry’s Bar & Restaurant in the Financial District for lunch with four family members. However, when they stepped out of the restaurant at about 1:30 p.m., the sky had turned orange.
“You couldn’t even breathe,” said Ms. Arthur, 31. “It was so sharp and so sudden. It felt like the world rapidly changed in two hours.”
The two took the subway home, and Mx. Cohen, 28, waved the camera around, recording the “apocalyptic wedding day,” as they described it: the eerily empty streets, the couple in their wedding outfits and neon green KN95 face masks and Ms. Arthur’s bouquet of flowers, that wilted because of the poor air quality.
“We kept joking that we have an air purifier on our wedding registry, and it would have been great to have gotten that sooner,” said Mx. Cohen.
They received a lot of looks from strangers as they walked the sullen streets of Lower Manhattan. “It’s exciting to see married couples, but they were like, ‘What? Today?’” Mx. Cohen said.
The two chose their wedding date just a week before. Mx. Cohen had previously filed a petition to change their first name to “Grey.” As soon as the name change was processed, the couple selected the earliest available slot at City Hall to get legally married.
Their reception, however, is not until September in West Kill, N.Y. Mx. Cohen, who is transgender, has a gender-affirming surgery scheduled in August and, since their own current health insurance does not cover the surgery, the marriage status would allow Mx. Cohen to use Ms. Arthur’s health insurance.
“Classic American love story,” Ms. Arthur joked.
The couple met in December 2019 when they matched on Tinder. Ms. Arthur was visiting New York to celebrate New Year’s Eve with a friend. Her Tinder bio read: “‘I’m in New York for the weekend,’ winky face,” Mx. Cohen recalled.
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“I was like, ‘ooh, that sounds fun,’” Mx. Cohen said. So, they messaged Ms. Arthur: “Hey, you’re really cute.”
The pair met at Clems, a bar in Williamsburg. “We went home together and we are inseparable since,” Mx. Cohen said. “It’s a very classic lesbian love story.”
A week after their first date, Mx. Cohen was visiting a friend in Buffalo, N.Y., where Mx. Arthur is from. Mx. Cohen, who was living in Williamsburg and is from Rockaway, Queens, stayed in Mx. Arthur’s apartment for five days. “When I had to go home after those five days, it was very hard,” Mx. Cohen said. “I think we both knew that we had something very serious.”
In March 2020, Mx. Cohen drove to Buffalo to stay in Ms. Arthur’s apartment to ride out the Covid-19 stay at home orders.
“Grey never left,” Ms. Arthur said.
Mx. Cohen graduated from the University at Buffalo with a bachelor’s degree in environmental design. Mx. Cohen is currently a law school student at Fordham University and a summer legal intern at the A.C.L.U. of Florida. Ms. Arthur graduated from Georgetown University with a bachelor’s in culture and politics, and she is a technical sourcer at Cruise, a self-driving vehicle company.
Ms. Arthur proposed in July 2021 in Daddy’s Plants, a plant shop in Buffalo. After she went down on one knee, Mx. Cohen read out loud a poem that they had written for Ms. Arthur and had kept in their wallet for months. The two framed the poem in their apartment in Park Slope, where they moved to in April 2022.
The couple were wed by Madeline Plasencia, a city clerk, in front of two witnesses, Mx. Cohen’s mother, Tina Cohen, and Ms. Arthur’s father, Don Arthur. The elopement had come together in the span of seven days. Mx. Cohen said that their L.G.B.T.Q. community helped the couple throw their last minute wedding, including Lucas Dean, Ms. Arthur’s makeup artist, and Miriam Bloom Designs, the florist.
Much of the couple’s relationship has been about finding joy in difficult times, Mx. Cohen said. Ms. Arthur’s mother passed away in March 2021, and Mx. Cohen, who came out as transgender a year into their relationship, said it was a difficult time given the prevalence of anti-trans rhetoric and legislation.
“Having the day we end up married be a day when this sky is on fire is nothing new to us,” Ms. Arthur said.
That evening, they had a celebratory dinner with five friends at the Fly, a restaurant in Brooklyn. Afterward, they went to Ginger’s Bar, a lesbian establishment. While several friends had canceled to avoid exposure to the poor air quality, the couple was unbothered that their wedding ceremony happened to be on a historically chaotic day.
“That care, compassion and deep, deep love that we have for each other can take on anything — even if the world is on fire — because we’ll always have each other,” Mx. Cohen said.
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