“As corny as it may sound, when I talked to Jason I felt like I knew him all my life,” she said. He felt it too. “At one point he said he felt he had already been in my presence. I didn’t want to be overly forward-thinking, but I said confidently, ‘Well, why am I not in your presence?’”
Their first date, on June 14, 2020, was dinner at his home in LA. It lasted six hours and ended with a kiss. Within a week they had said, “I love you.” By the end of June, Mrs. Chexnayder had packed up her new apartment and had moved into Mr. White’s house. They both got good at confronting raised eyebrows about their age difference and the warp speed of their love affair.
“We recognized it was not commonplace, and we talked about it,” said Mr. white. “Then people started telling us that if you see us together, you understand. It makes sense.”
On July 18, 2020, just a few weeks after they moved in together, Mr. White proposed on the floor of his bedroom while assembling a nightstand for Mrs. Chexnayder’s side of the bed. “I said, ‘This life will only be perfect if you join me,'” said Mr. White. Her yes, like everything in their relationship, came quickly. But their wedding at Calamigos Ranch in Malibu, California, took more than a year to plan.
On December 31, 2021, Ms. Chexnayder and Mr. White were married by their friend Teron Beal, a songwriter and photographer ordained for the occasion by the Universal Life Church, in front of 130 vaccinated guests. When they said they missed the 20 guests who canceled at the last minute because of Omicron, they meant it.
“We got the best advice from our wedding planner, Slomique Hawrylo, which was: don’t feel obligated to invite anyone,” said Ms. Chexnayder. “Just invite the people you want in your marriage. That helped us to be really aware of who was there. And it turned out to be the most magical evening.”