I Do!: Uniondale-raised Courtney Porter and Ray Harlequin

The first time Courtney Porter noticed Ray Harlequin was in 2007, when they were both 13, as he stared at her across a Sabbath school classroom in Brooklyn.

“I didn’t even know who this boy was,” Porter said, laughing.

Harlequin, a software engineer, recalled that many of his church friends considered Porter “the girl everyone wanted to talk to, but no one had the courage to.” When he finally did, he found their conversations easy.

That teenage spark eventually led to a love story that came full circle more than a decade later.

Porter, raised in Uniondale, and Harlequin, who moved from Georgetown, Guyana, to East Flatbush at age 6, grew up attending Mount of Olives Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Brooklyn. They dated briefly as teens but drifted apart.

In 2017, after exchanging their usual birthday messages, Porter reconnected with Harlequin on social media. They were 22. She later invited him to visit her at the University of Delaware, where she was a graduate music student. The next weekend, Harlequin made the trip, and their dinner at Cheesecake Factory rekindled their friendship and soon, their romance.

Through years of long distance and the challenges of the pandemic, their bond grew stronger, they said. By 2021, the couple had moved to Kentucky together while Porter pursued her PhD.

“We learned how to lean on each other,” Harlequin said. “We became a team.”

Harlequin proposed July 3, 2022, during a family trip to Jamaica for Porter’s mother’s 60th birthday. Relatives lined a hill overlooking the ocean, each handing Porter a rose with words of affirmation before she reached the top, where Harlequin was waiting.

“The sky was purple and orange,” Porter recalled. “It looked unreal.”

On Nov. 4, before 200 guests, they wed at the Swan Club in Roslyn — the venue where Porter’s parents had held their reception 30 years earlier.