It was 6 a.m. when Tim Bruns first saw his future wife, Eleni Lazares, at JFK Airport waiting to board Delta Flight 568 to Los Angeles.
But since it was so early, the dazed, slightly hungover bachelor felt he was in no position to talk. “Man, she’s really pretty,” Bruns, then 28, recalls thinking that morning in November 2018. “But I hope I’m not sitting next to her.”
Sleep was a higher priority for Lazarus. “I arrived at the airport without makeup. I looked terrible – she says.
Everything changed when Bruns walked to the plane’s aisle and sat in seat 23B next to Lazares. “I thought, ‘Oh, he’s really cute,'” she says.
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Finally working up the courage to speak, Bruns suggested Lazares try the cheese and crackers when the flight attendant came with a selection of snacks.
Soon the duo were talking and watching non-stop Oceans 8 and Deadpool 2 together. “We played it at the same time, so if someone went to the bathroom, we’d pause it,” says Bruns, who lived in Los Angeles while Lazares lived in New York.
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A cross-coastal relationship ensued and Lazares moved to California in 2021 and eventually changed jobs. “It was a lot of changes, but Tim was very supportive the whole time,” she says, “which made me love him even more.”
While on vacation in Cape Cod the following year, Bruns asked Lazares’ father for his daughter’s hand in marriage.
The next day, the couple boarded a plane to Florence, Italy, and Bruns proposed to Lazares on bended knee on the famous Ponte Vecchia. “Everyone in the square started cheering and clapping,” Lazares recalls. “I wasn’t expecting it that night. I remember wearing a dress where I was like, ‘You wouldn’t propose to me in this.’
“It was a beautiful moment,” says Bruns.
Eleni Lazares and Tim Bruns.
Courtesy of Eleni Lazares and Tim Bruns
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On September 22, 2023, the couple married in a Greek Orthodox ceremony officiated by Father Alex Karloutsos at The Muses in Southampton, New York.
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Paying tribute to the serendipitous circumstances of their first meeting, the couple placed gold airplane bottle openers and cocktail napkins emblazoned with the official Delta Airlines logo on the reception tables.
And for their honeymoon, they spent 10 days in Mallorca and Sardinia.
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Eleni Lazares and Tim Bruns.
Aaron & Whitney DuRall
Lazares wonders how an early morning flight five years ago led her to marriage. “Every time I was with [Tim], I could never stop laughing,” says Lazares, now a 33-year-old digital content producer. “He made me feel at home and safe.”
Her newlywed husband attributes it to old-fashioned magic. “People like to say they don’t believe in love at first sight,” says Bruns, also 33, a solutions engineer. “I think some people get lucky like that. In my opinion, it’s still out there because it happened to us.”
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