Growing up in Dallas, Kelly Ann Winget’s parents used to remind her that her lifestyle was not the norm, but being gay in a conservative state like Texas= had nothing to do with it. Instead, Ms. Winget, who described herself as the daughter of a fifth-generation oil and gas family, said they were “very well-to-do.” But her parents still “wanted us to be exposed to the real world — if we wanted something, we had to work for it,” she said.
Ms. Winget, 33, started working at a carwash at 15 to buy a $300 pair of jeans, and she hasn’t stopped working since.
In June 2020, on her first date with Sarah Naomi Matteson in Argyle, Texas, Ms. Winget fell asleep on Ms. Matteson’s bed 20 minutes after knocking on the front door. She had been working very hard as a vice president of investor relations at a private equity firm in Reno, Nev.
“It felt so natural to walk in there, and talk to each other a little and then just go to bed,” Ms. Winget said. “We describe it now as a ‘coming home’ feeling.”
Ms. Matteson, 34, offered to set an alarm for Ms. Winget so she wouldn’t miss her flight the next morning. Ms. Winget missed the flight anyway.
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
Ms. Matteson and Ms. Winget met through TikTok during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. The app “made the world less lonely during a difficult, isolating time,” Ms. Winget said.
By June, its algorithm had connected them to each other’s videos: When Ms. Winget created a TikTok video about her favorite cocktail, Ms. Matteson messaged her to ask what a Mexican Candy Shot was.
The duo exchanged nonstop messages over TikTok for two days, until they moved the conversation to video calls. When Ms. Winget asked Ms. Matteson if she wanted to meet in person on June 17, during a 12-hour stretch she would be in Dallas for client meetings, Ms. Matteson was ready, though she wasn’t in the market for a relationship.
Ms. Matteson had been legally divorced for less than a month from her 10-year marriage when she and Ms. Winget connected in person. She has a daughter, 13, and a son, 10. “I had just been hanging out with my kids, figuring out Covid,” she said. She thought Ms. Winget was fun, and getting to know her became a welcome distraction.
Their backgrounds, however, were vastly different.
“We grew up incredibly poor,” Ms. Matteson, a social worker in the Argyle, Texas, school district, said. She and her three siblings moved around the West Coast frequently with their mother, until she was placed in foster care as an adolescent. After aging out of foster care, she won grants to attend the Texas Woman’s University, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in social work in 2011. She then earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2014.
Ms. Matteson now considers her friends her chosen family, whereas Ms. Winget treats her family like friends. When she asked Ms. Matteson to have brunch with her on the morning of her missed flight at Mango’s, a restaurant in South Lake, Ms. Winget also invited her sister, brother-in-law and mother. “We’re very close,” she said, adding, “I’m a big believer in failing fast. I was feeling really good about Sarah, and I was like, let me see if they feel really good about her, too.”
They did. Within a month, Ms. Winget quit the Nevada company to form her own private equity firm, Alternative Wealth Partners, in Dallas. In October, Ms. Matteson and her children moved into Ms. Winget’s house in Oak Point, Texas. The following year, the couple built a new house in Argyle, so Ms. Matteson’s children could keep attending public school in that district.
The two had been floating the idea of getting married for months, until finally they exchanged custom engagement rings and handwritten cards proposing to each other on March 14, 2022, during a trip to the Château de Chenonceau in Loire Valley, France. Ms. Matteson’s ring is a rose gold, pink sapphire and diamond ring, and Ms. Winget’s is a white gold, turquoise and diamond ring. Two weddings followed the joint proposal.
On June 16, they were legally married at Flippen Park in Highland Park, Texas, in an intimate ceremony by Ms. Winget’s sister, Alison Winget, who became a Universal Life Church minister for the event. On June 24, Ms. Winget’s longtime friend Mario Nguyen led a ceremony for 38 family members and close friends at Chateau de Puits es Pratx in Ginestas, France.
The couple shared how the weddings felt like an extension of their relationship: fun and familiar. “We’re really, really happy,” Ms. Matteson said.
Source: Read Full Article