When Adam Dorsay was growing up, Monday and Wednesday were his least-favorite days of the week — time for Hebrew school. Dorsay might have felt differently had he known that one of his classmates from the third grade onward, Aurianne Jacobs, would eventually become his wife.
This is not to say that Dorsay and Jacobs, both now 34, were childhood sweethearts. They did not so much as belong to the same circle of friends. And before they got married this past weekend at their old synagogue, Saratoga’s Congregation Beth David, the Petaluma couple had been together for less than 10 months — only after a serendipitous reunion at Beth David last March.
During all the intervening years, both say they thought well of each other. In the 11th grade Dorsay developed a crush on Jacobs, which she never picked up on — despite a clearly flirtatious message in her yearbook.
“I think I was really naive at the time because reading it now it’s clear there was an attraction there that was pretty blatant,” she says.
The two didn’t stay in touch after graduation, but seven years later, they ran into each other at the Bangkok airport, where both had a layover on the way to different destinations. Despite what Dorsay describes as “a delightful nine-minute conversation” — the longest he and Jacobs had ever had until then — the two didn’t see each other again for another nine years.
Until March 10, when the right mix of events brought them back to Beth David at exactly the same time. It was Mitzvah Day at the synagogue, and Dorsay — who was then living in Millbrae — was there in his role as adviser for Junior Kadima, a youth group whose mitzvah that day was making greeting cards for terminally ill children.
Jacobs, who lived more than two hours away in Sebastopol, would not have shown up at all except that the event fell on her niece’s birthday, and she had taken the 11-year-old out to breakfast. Jacobs planned to just drop off her niece at the synagogue, but the girl pleaded with her auntie to come inside. “I said OK, kind of reluctantly,” recalls Jacobs.
As Jacobs chatted in the hallway with her sister, whom Dorsay knew as a Junior Kadima mother, Dorsay stepped out into the hallway to find paintbrushes and towels for the greeting-card project. Jacobs recalls: “As my sister and I were talking, I saw this very handsome man walking toward me in the hallway and thinking, ‘Oh, I wonder who that guy is?’ But he didn’t look familiar at all.”
Once he approached her and reintroduced himself, she suggested catching up for a few minutes. Yet Dorsay remained so focused on his errand that at first he said he couldn’t talk.
But Jacobs insisted. “I must have just had a feeling that here’s this person who shared a lot of my past — not in a really intimate way, but we went to the same high school and Hebrew school for 10 years. It felt too important a moment to just pass up. If I let him go, I didn’t know if I’d see him again.”
So she repeated, “Five minutes.” Finally, Dorsay came to his senses, thinking, “You’ve been attracted to this woman all these years; don’t be a shmuck — talk to her!”
Was he glad he did. During their brief chat, Jacobs opened up, revealing among other things that she was newly single, and Dorsay recalls being “completely intoxicated by everything about her — the energy, the content of what she was saying. I thought she was more gorgeous than ever.”
Jacobs too felt something special was unfolding, “feeling the bigness of it, the kind of cosmic mystery, the magic of meeting him right then and there.”
They exchanged phone numbers, and Dorsay, unable to think of anything or anyone else the rest of the day, left her a message the moment he got home.
Jacobs didn’t call him back for two days. Her sister had told her that she’d heard Dorsay was engaged. “I remember feeling so disappointed at the moment,” says Jacobs. “It wasn’t huge, but it felt like the loss of a possibility.”
But it was just hearsay; Dorsay had never been engaged before meeting Jacobs. And when she did call him, he cleared up the misunderstanding almost immediately. The two made their first date for two weeks later, both frustrated that their schedules and distance didn’t allow for an earlier get-together.
Dorsay’s first words to Jacobs following his two-hour drive from Millbrae to Sebastopol were, “Hi. Tell me everything about you.” Jacobs was attracted to his candor. “We’re both really intense, so I liked that he was so forthcoming, how out there he was with what he was thinking and feeling.”
Dorsay agrees. “Neither of us is into pretenses; we’re just who we are, and I love that quality about her. She’s very real, no artificial flavors or colors.”
After only about a month of dating, including almost daily phone calls, the birthday party for another niece became what Dorsay describes as a “relationship accelerator.”
There, he met Jacobs’s parents, and also found “humongously affirming” the healthy and loving way he saw Jacobs relating to her parents and nieces. “Seeing her in that context was like a thousand dates,” says Dorsay, who like his bride greatly values family closeness.
The two sets of parents, active members of Beth David, had been acquainted for years. So it’s not surprising that when the families got together during their children’s courtship, they got along fabulously well. “We had Shabbat dinner, and it was mishpoche immediately,” says Dorsay.
Aware of their compatibility, and admiring so much about Dorsay, Jacobs quickly knew he was the one. “I think I was clear that he was my husband and the father of my children before he got clear on that. I remember beginning to fall in love with him by the first week of May…I’d never been so happy in anybody’s presence.”
If there was any uncertainty about marriage on Dorsay’s part, a trip to Maui in July cleared it away. “She was the easiest travel companion I could imagine, and being with her day in and day out there was no question I had to propose to her. There was no way I was going to let her get away.”
Dorsay says he would have proposed in Hawaii, but did not have a ring nor, more importantly for him, had he asked for her parents’ blessing.
He remembers soon showing up at her parents’ house with a small stuffed ram and some Chanukah gelt — his version of a gift of livestock and gold in exchange for their daughter’s hand in marriage — and, two days and two sleepless nights later, arriving in Sebastopol with a traditional yet touchingly personal proposal.
Jacobs’ reaction? “I was just so blown open emotionally at that moment that I just burst out crying. It took me a minute or so before I was able to respond.”
Looking back, Adam Dorsay realizes that little of what led to this joyous moment was pure chance, noting for example that his mother was instrumental in both his Hebrew school attendance and in instituting Mitzvah Day. He cannot help but think that his marriage to Jacobs was meant to be. “I thought it was beshert that it would happen. She was definitely my beshert.”