For One Perpetual Bridesmaid, a Match ‘So Worth the Wait’

Article originally published to the New York Times. View full article here.

Rachel Liverman had grown weary of dating apps and was beginning to wonder if she would ever find a partner. Then Jeremy Crane came along.

The 30-minute facials Rachel An Liverman is known for don’t deserve all the credit for the glow she wore on her March 18 wedding to Jeremy William Crane. Love, the time-honored radiance elixir, also played a role. She just wishes it had taken a few shortcuts to find her.

Ms. Liverman, 37, is the founder and chief executive of Glowbar, a chain of facial studios. When she met Mr. Crane, 35, in January 2022 on the dating app Bumble, she had been an on-and-off presence on dating apps since 2011, the year she moved to Manhattan from her hometown of Newton, Mass.

Assurances from friends that she was a catch were no longer chasing away depressing thoughts of a future without a life partner. “All my friends were married and I was at — and in — everyone else’s wedding,” she said.

Mr. Crane relieved her of those thoughts within days of their first meeting, on Jan. 10, 2022, at Barrow’s Pub in Manhattan’s West Village.

Mr. Crane, 35, is the founder of Retrievables, a technology business that connects companies dealing with delinquent accounts to collection firms. When he and Ms. Liverman matched, he was living in Long Island City, where he had moved with a girlfriend in 2019 from his hometown Rochester, N.Y. After their 2021 breakup, he too joined a bevy of dating apps.

His experience, however, was quite different from Ms. Liverman’s. He liked most of the women he met online. “I dated a lot and absolutely loved it,” he said. “I enjoyed going out and meeting people and getting to know different establishments around the city.”

Ms. Liverman had experienced more than a few bad dates, including one in which a kind waitress at Morton’s steakhouse in Union Square helped her flee through the back door. Ms. Liverman said she “was the stereotypical single girl in New York City, crying in the fetal position at night.”

By the time the two met at Barrow’s, after five days of messaging, Mr. Crane was hooked on the repartee he and Ms. Liverman had established. “We’re both really good at banter,” he said. “With Rachel, after five minutes, the messages just didn’t stop. We were talking a lot, lot, lot — to the point where I was entirely distracted, and the only thing I could think about was the next message.”

The back-and-forth on Bumble left Ms. Liverman comfortable enough to make a bold entrance at Barrow’s. When Mr. Crane approached with a great-to-meet-you hug and kiss, she playfully swatted him away and sat down to re-affix a fake nail that had fallen off. This didn’t dim his optimism even a little about the woman who had invited him for a beer at what she called her favorite dive bar.

They spent the next three nights getting to know each other on back-to-back dates. By the end of the week, they were a couple in love. Mr. Crane fell right away; Ms. Liverman needed a few days longer to be sure love had finally come for her.

Mr. Crane grew up the middle son in a family of three tight-knit brothers and their parents, Howard and Leslie Crane. Before he formed Retrievables in 2021, Mr. Crane founded StadiumPark, an app that helped users navigate stadium and arena parking. The app, which he closed when he moved to New York, was up and running in 2013, three years after he graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a bachelor’s degree in consumer science.

Ms. Liverman started carving her entrepreneurial path when she was 10, with a leg-waxing business at her home. A calling to improve the complexions of the masses may have been in her DNA. In her 1985 birth announcement, The Boston Globe hinted as much. “It said, the granddaughter of the famed Catherine Hinds was born without a wrinkle,” Ms. Liverman said.

Ms. Hinds, her maternal grandmother, who died last year, founded one of the country’s first accredited schools of aesthetics, the Catherine Hinds Institute, in 1979 in Medford, Mass. Ms. Liverman’s mother, An Hinds, who lives in Newton, is the president and chief executive of the institute. Her parents divorced when she was a toddler but remained good friends, she said. Erwin Liverman and Ms. Liverman’s stepmother, Nancy Liverman, who is like a second mother, also live in Newton. Her younger brother and sister live nearby.

The family supported Ms. Liverman’s first business, Rachel’s Waxing Salon, when she was a fifth-grader by supplying her first business cards. “I handed them out to people and told them they could come get their legs waxed at my house,” she said. Two years earlier, her mother had given her a first facial in the family living room. “I always say I was so lucky to grow up in an industry that wasn’t selling tires or something,” she said. “As a little girl, it was amazing to watch these women. My grandmother was a pioneer.”

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Tulane University in 2007, Ms. Liverman worked briefly as a buyer for T.J. Maxx, then switched to beauty. Her first job in New York was at Birchbox, a subscription product samples company. When she started raising funds for Glowbar in 2017, she was head of visual merchandising and business development at Beautyblender, a purveyor of pink makeup sponges. The 30-minute-facial concept she developed for Glowbar was a way of addressing a problem staring back at her from the mirror in her West Village apartment.

“I wasn’t getting facials in New York because I didn’t have time and I didn’t know who to trust,” she said. “Nail salons and celebrity spas and everything in between were doing facials.” Glowbar, which opened in 2019 and now has six locations in New York and Connecticut, offers them exclusively.

For other couples, a shared entrepreneurial instinct might have been enough for sparks to fly. For Mr. Crane, that was ancillary. It was Ms. Liverman’s spirit he fell in love with before he walked her home on their first date. “Rachel is easy to love,” he said. “She’s engaging and authentic and just comes off like she never met a stranger.”

Ms. Liverman felt a hard-won sense of ease with Mr. Crane. “I’m a tall person and I capture people’s attention, and I had walked into the bar with all this swagger,” said Ms. Liverman, who stands 5 foot 10. (Mr. Crane is 6 feet tall.) The squad of friends who regularly came to her rescue after disastrous dates in the past, including her neighbor Erica Thomas, had pointed out that men may find her intimidating.

“But Jeremy was different,” Ms. Thomas said. “Her confidence didn’t shake him at all. She could be herself around him. He saw the light in her right away.”

On Jan. 11, the day after their Barrow’s date, Mr. Crane made her a branzino dinner at his place in Long Island City. On Jan. 12, she matched him with a skillet chicken dish in the West Village. Two months later, when his lease was up, he moved into her place, where they still live. “I felt good about it,” Mr. Crane said. “It didn’t feel like a risk.”

His proposal didn’t feel risky either, because Ms. Liverman had told him how she wanted it to happen. “I didn’t want my friends popping out of bushes in a park,” she said. “I didn’t want any forced attention. I just wanted to get engaged in bed, over my first cup of coffee.”

Mr. Crane did not deviate from that vision. At 7 a.m. on June 4, 2022, he gave her an emerald solitaire ring and a love letter. In the letter, he said, “I told her I knew right away I wanted to be with her forever. I told her she makes me feel content and appreciated and challenged.”

Ms. Liverman and Mr. Crane were married on March 18 in Manhattan at the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts. Rabbi David Gelfand, from the Temple of Israel of the City of New York, officiated a traditional Jewish ceremony for 225 guests.

Ms. Liverman, in a floor-length, off-the-shoulder Vera Wang wedding gown, was escorted down the aisle by her parents to a huppah garlanded with white blooms. Mr. Crane, in a Corneliani tuxedo, was surrounded there by a group of their closest family members. To mark the start of their life as a married couple, the rabbi wrapped them in a tallit, or wedding shawl, that had passed through generations of Ms. Liverman’s family; later they sipped wine from a cup that belonged to Mr. Crane’s great-grandfather.

The moment Rabbi Gelfand pronounced them married was “magical,” Ms. Liverman said. “Seeing all our loved ones there for us both, I was overwhelmed with gratitude,” she said.

At a reception also at the foundation, the spirit of gratitude was still with her. Addressing her guests, Ms. Liverman said, “I basically looked at Jeremy and said, ‘You were so worth the wait.’”