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Moda dünyasında neler oluyor? Yeni fikirler, öne çıkan koleksiyonlar, en vogue trendler, ünlülerden güzelllik sırları ve en popüler partilerden haberdar olmak için haftalık e-bültenimize kaydolun.
A neurosurgery PA on Long Island, a performance physical therapist in Dallas, and a long-distance romance that refused to stay small.
Some love stories begin with a glance across a room. Ashley and Nevin’s began with an algorithm.
“Nevin showed up as a suggested follow on my Instagram,” Ashley recalls. “I didn’t know him at the time, but I remember thinking he was cute and liking how active and fit he was. I didn’t think much of it.” Months later, his face reappeared, this time on a dating app. “I was surprised he was single,” she says. “And I swiped.”
On the other side of the screen, Nevin was about to give up. “I was just about to delete my dating apps when I came across Ashley’s profile,” he says. What followed was not a first date but a first phone call, one that stretched on for hours. “For the first thirty minutes I was so jittery I had to pace my room the entire time because I couldn’t sit still. We just riffed off each other and time disappeared. Nothing about it felt forced. It was the first time a girl had ever made me feel that way.”
They FaceTimed the next day. “The second I saw her face I was blown away,” Nevin says. “Photos are one thing, but seeing how she moved, how she talked, seeing her in her element, I remember thinking, never in a million years did I expect to be talking to someone this beautiful. That wasn’t the moment I fell in love, but it was the moment I realized I was getting very lucky and had better not mess it up.” Within a month he was on a flight to New York. “The moment we saw each other in person, all the crazy thoughts of falling in love before ever meeting just made complete sense.”
For Ashley, the moment arrived on one of their first dates, over an omakase dinner celebrating Nevin’s belated birthday. She made an offhand remark about the little glass fish chopstick holders on the table and thought nothing more of it.
Later that night, walking down a random street in the city, Nevin stopped her. “He said, ‘I have something for you,’ and pulled those two fish out of his pocket,” she says. “It was something so small and silly, but I remember thinking how spontaneous and playful he was. He made ordinary moments feel exciting. Being with him meant we could laugh together and never take life too seriously.”
A trip to Texas sealed it. “Seeing how he is with his family, and how much pride he took in introducing me to them and making sure I was welcomed and taken care of,” she says, “confirmed it even more.”
Ashley is a neurosurgery physician assistant on Long Island. Nevin runs his own performance physical therapy practice in Dallas. The distance between them is measured in flights, and they take one almost every other week.
“Whoever says long distance is not doable is wrong,” the couple say together. “It takes a hundred percent intent from both ends and a lot of planning. We’re lucky our work is flexible enough to build around it.” But flexibility does not make it painless. “It never gets easier, because the more you fall in love, the more you want to be in the same room. The drive back to the airport is always the hardest part.”
The running joke among their families, Nevin admits, is that he lives in New York and she lives in Texas.
This past May, on their first international trip together, he proposed at Castelo de São Jorge in Lisbon. They will marry next spring in a traditional South Indian wedding.
The engagement shoot was Ashley’s idea, and a long-held one. She had visited Vienna at 18 or 19 with her family and her best friend’s family, and has always considered it one of the most underrated cities in the world. Months ago, scrolling Instagram, she saw an engagement shoot at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and casually asked Nevin whether they could do theirs there.
“Never in a million years did I think we’d actually manifest it,” she says. “I really thought he’d say I was taking it too far. But to my surprise he said, let’s go for it.” She smiles. “We’ve always bounced spontaneous ideas off each other and then actually chased them. It’s one of the things I love about us.”
For the photography and film, there was never any question. The couple had long admired the work of John of John Martin Productions and Alvin, the cinematographer behind Alvin Alex Films, and already knew they wanted the duo to capture their wedding. “Their elaborate international shoots and their ability to capture both the details and the scenery made them the perfect duo to bring our engagement shoot vision to life,” they say. “When we first shared the idea, we thought they might think we were a little crazy, but they were immediately so supportive and excited to make it happen.”
They booked the tickets the day they landed home from Portugal. Hallstatt, the lakeside village in the Austrian Alps, was John and Alvin’s suggestion. “We just trusted them,” Nevin says.
Then came the twist. The couple landed in Vienna the afternoon before the first shoot and discovered that Nevin’s luggage had never left New York. “Whole wardrobe, all my products, Ashley’s hair tools, all gone,” he says.
“After hyperventilating, we checked into the hotel and immediately went shopping,” Ashley says. “I didn’t think it was possible, but we bought an entire new wardrobe, got his suit tailored the same day, replaced everything, and still had a successful shoot the next morning.”
Vienna, Nevin says, exceeded every expectation. “As a performance PT, I appreciate anything built with that level of craft and detail, and that city reminded me of the intricacy of the human body.” Hallstatt offered a different kind of beauty. “My favorite moment was the swans wandering up to us while we were playing with angles for photo and film by the water. You couldn’t script it better than that.”
For Ashley, what made the images work was that nothing about them was staged. “The whole shoot felt natural. We’re always smiling and laughing about something, and John and Alvin captured exactly that. Just us being ourselves with each other.”
Which, for a couple who fell in love over a phone call and closed the distance one flight at a time, is precisely the point.
Photos by John Martin Productions. Film by Alvin Alex Films.
