I Do!: Meghan Simchock and Tyler Kapela, of Amityville

Meghan Simchock and Tyler Kapela met in 2018 when he joined a group of friends out for a bar crawl in Huntington to celebrate Simchock’s 22nd birthday.

“Afterward, four of us went out for pizza, and he took a bite of pizza right out of my mouth,” she said. “He was being goofy. He was the only one who took the bait to do it.”

“It was crust,” clarified Kapela, 31, who is from Mineola.

After that evening, they talked for a year, Simchock said, then didn’t talk for a year, then started talking again. He asked her to marry him on Dec. 23, 2023, during a walk on the beach in Port Jefferson. They were celebrating Simchock’s mother’s birthday, with her parents and sister, while a friend was hiding along the beach. “I was absolutely shocked,” she said.

They married June 6 at East Wind Long Island in Wading River. “It was awesome,” she said. “We took advantage of their packages to help with planning.” She needed help, she said, “because I bought a business in the middle of all that.” Simchock, 29, from Hauppauge, owns Mid Island Gymnastics studio in Hicksville.

Kapela works in the engineering department at NYU Langone Hospital-Long Island in Mineola.

They celebrated with 200 guests, 10 groomsmen and five bridal attendants. Their Yorkie, Cooper, made a brief appearance for photos, dressed in a suit and wearing a boutonniere. Among their favorite moments that day, they said, was a “second entrance” after they changed outfits, when they threw “Kapela Social Club” T-shirts to guests. Another “crowd favorite,’’ Kapela said, was the groom’s dance with his mom and the bride’s dance with her father, when “she picked up her father and he was cracking up,” he said. “Everyone loved that.”

Simchock said another special moment was hearing the wedding speech she had prerecorded to play just before she walked down the aisle, in which she talked about their future together.