Finding Love Across the Hall

Chris Wiggins moved to Manhattan with two friends in 2013 after they graduated from the University of Central Florida in Orlando. They split a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport neighborhood.

At the same time, Annie Jackson moved into the same building with two of her friends. Soon after they settled in, Taylor Klessens, one of Ms. Jackson’s roommates struck up a conversation in the elevator with Mike Morgan, one of Mr. Wiggin’s roommates. They discovered that they not only lived on the same floor, but directly across the hall from each other.

“Mike was the most ambitious when it came to meeting new friends,” Mr. Wiggins said. “After he learned about our neighbors, he delivered Ferrero Rocher chocolates to the girls’ doorstep with a note saying ‘Let’s get together soon.’”

A few days later, the men and women crossed paths on the building’s roof deck. They hit it off and were nearly inseparable from that point on. “From day one, we had an open-door policy,” said Ms. Jackson, a publicist at Small Girls PR and a graduate of Utah State University. “The boys’ apartment was ours and ours was theirs.”

Mr. Wiggins and Ms. Jackson, both 31, spent the first summer as friends, but by September their casual flirting became much more. Mr. Wiggins worked up the nerve to hold Ms. Jackson’s hand on a bus trip from Washington to New York. “This was the first time we showed real interest in each other,” she said. “Chris finally felt confident enough to ask me on a date, but it took him two weeks to do it.”

The date was a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Mr. Wiggins was too nervous to kiss Ms. Jackson good night. Instead, he gave her a hug at the door before retreating across the hall. Ms. Jackson, though, was not too intimidated to escalate the relationship. As soon as he closed the apartment door, she texted him “Truth or Dare” and proceeded to dare him to come out and give her a kiss.

“She knew I needed a nudge to kiss her,” said Mr. Wiggins, who works in sales at Figma, a design platform for applications and websites. “After the kiss, we sat in the hallway for hours. Neither of us wanted to say good night.”

They didn’t tell their roommates about the kiss. “We worried that our dating might complicate the friendship of the group,” Ms. Jackson said.

After dating for six months, Ms. Jackson decided that she wasn’t ready to commit to a serious relationship. They split up and dated other people while still living across the hall from each other and working to maintain the group friendship. “That was very difficult,” she said. After a year they realized that they wanted to be together and jumped back into a relationship.

In 2018, they decided to move in together and found an apartment in Downtown Brooklyn. “I proposed to Annie on her birthday in 2019 in that apartment,” Mr. Jackson said.

The two were married July 17 at Snowpine Lodge in Alta, Utah. Katie Neal, an ordained minister through the Universal Life Church, officiated.

All 150 guests took over the lodge for the summer camp-themed wedding with three days of hiking, swimming, karaoke, star gazing and dancing.

“The weekend was everything we ever hoped for — s’mores under the stars, hiking, amazing music, hours of dancing, multiple moose sightings, and most important, fantastic company,” Ms. Jackson said.

“It blew my expectations out of the water,” Mr. Wiggins added. “I wish we could get married every single year.”