Olivia Rochman had just flown from Boston to New Orleans for a long weekend. She planned to attend the anniversary party for a good friend’s jewelry brand, Porter Lyons.
Olivia had largely called New Orleans home since graduating from Tulane University in 2013 (with a three-year stint in Austin, Texas, in between.) But after Hurricane Ida wrecked her Nola rental, she’d moved back home to her parents’ in Newton temporarily in 2022. Her fintech job was remote, plus, it was nice to spend time with family: “[My father] was like, ‘When we said go south, we meant Connecticut.’”
Coby Venable, a real estate attorney from Georgia, planned to attend the Porter Lyons party as a quick pitstop: “I’m thinking free drinks, in bed by 10 p.m. kind of vibe,” he says.
He’d moved to New Orleans after graduating from law school at Emory University in 2015. But even with years of overlapping social scenes and circles, he and Olivia had never officially met.
The party was in a two-story showroom near Jackson Square; there were oysters, a champagne luge, and a fashionable guest list, including hoteliers Jayson Seidman and Paris Neill, Olivia’s close friends, now also her would-be matchmakers.
While chatting with Coby, Jayson called Olivia over to introduce the two. She was intrigued by Coby’s dry humor and quick wit.
“He was giving professor‚” Olivia remembers.
Feeling exuberant to be back in town, Olivia interrupted the conversation to go upstairs for an ear piercing. (The store offers piercing services.)
“I was like a bat out of hell,” she says. “He is an excellent listener, and I am an excellent talker.”
Coby, charmed, waited for her to return: “I don’t remember exactly what the conversation was about, but I just remember laughing a lot.”
As “the stragglers at the end of the party,” Coby suggested a date before she left town: “Why don’t I give you my phone number and we can meet up.”
Olivia’s response: “Absolutely not.”
“You’re going to ask for my number if you want to see me again,” she remembers saying. “He rapidly course corrected.”
Their first date was the next night at Columns, a historic Garden District hotel and restaurant owned by Jayson and Paris. They drank Tommy’s margaritas and didn’t mince words.
“He’s very sincere,” she says. “He was being thoughtful and transparent. … We both knew we wanted to get married. We both knew we wanted to have kids.”
Olivia emphasized the importance of family — Coby learned what that meant when he visited her in Boston two weeks later. They went to Newbury Street and Harvard Square, Foals at Roadrunner, and Sunday dinner with Olivia’s family, whom she fondly describes as “a lot.”
“We’re a Boston family,” she explains.
Coby was woefully unprepared for the single-digit temperatures, but the dinner didn’t spook him. He remembers thinking, “Why not meet them now? If it works out, I’ve known them since the beginning.”
“My dad’s a great storyteller,” says Olivia. “Coby just loved listening to the stories.” After dinner, her father told her: “That’s the first man you’ve brought home in 32 years who has the potential of being a keeper.”
Olivia and Coby traded visits and texts, and it wasn’t long before her return to New Orleans felt inevitable.
“I was really living for those next times we were going to see each other,” says Coby.
In February 2023, she, Coby, and her cat (Gator) and dog (Raisin), packed into her car for the 30-hour drive south. She moved back into Paris and Jayson’s now-restored carriage house, which, it transpired, was only blocks from Coby’s, where the couple now reside.
It soon became what Olivia calls a “really nice life together.”
“Love doesn’t always arrive with fireworks,” she says. “Sometimes it’s a steady hand, or a calm knowing, or just your body being finally at peace … what I found was the more time we spent together, that I was sleeping really well. I felt safe in my body. … I had thought, ‘If it’s safe that means it’s boring,’ and I never want boring. But I learned that safety is not necessarily complacency. You should feel safe.”
Coby had begun to embrace “type 2 fun,” a buzz phrase he defines as doing something “that might feel bad in the moment, but looking back, you’re thinking, ‘I’m so happy I did that.’” With Olivia, he learned to ski in Stowe, and two-step at the White Horse in Austin.
“It felt like she’d opened a door to something I didn’t even know existed,” he says. “And I was just happy to be there, along for the ride.”
He proposed in June 2024 at Porter Lyons, where they first met, with a re-creation of her mother’s heirloom ring that she had long-admired.
That month, the couple took a day trip to Martha’s Vineyard during a Cape vacation with Olivia’s family. They had made a list of potential wedding locations, but Olivia’s childhood Augusts were spent up-island, and when nostalgia hit, she knew there was no better place.
Olivia, 34, and Coby, 37, wed on Friday, June 6, in an outdoor ceremony at the Winnetu Oceanside Resort in Katama.
“We wanted the weekend to feel like a vacation that people got to take,” she explains, “and there just happened to be a party and some casual dinners thrown in.”
They had 53 guests and no wedding party; Olivia’s logic being “if you’re here, you’re as close to us as a bridesmaid or groomsman would be.” As the one who introduced them, Jayson officiated.
They chose the hotel for its proximity to the ferry and its unfussy aesthetic. There was not a “manicured blue hydrangea” in sight. Instead, Krishana Collins of Tea Lane Farm re-created up-island’s wildness with ranunculus and wisps of greenery. Olivia and her parents walked toward her groom, through the grass, to a string arrangement of Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers.”
And while the wedding was unforgettable, for Coby, marriage already felt familiar.
“When you find someone that you want to be with and you make that decision way before you walk up the aisle,” he says. “It formalizes it, puts the stamp on it. But I felt like we were married and going to be together from that time I went to Boston and had no jacket.”
Read more from The Big Day, The Boston Globe’s new weddings column.
Rachel Kim Raczka is a writer and editor in Boston. She can be reached at rachel.raczka@globe.com.
