When Leslie Marshall and Tamar Malloy began dating, Dr. Malloy was just weeks away from relocating to Colorado for a teaching job.
In June 2019, Leslie Marshall locked eyes with Tamar Malloy at a bus stop in Pittsburgh. As Dr. Malloy walked down the sidewalk, “I really wanted to know this person, but didn’t even know if they remembered my name,” Dr. Marshall recalled. “We took this half-step toward each other, where you’re like, ‘Will they reciprocate?’”
It was their second official meeting, more than a year and a half after a brief exchange at a happy hour in a local pub. At the time, Dr. Marshall was completing a doctorate in political science at the University of Pittsburgh, where Dr. Malloy was doing a postdoctoral fellowship in the same department. They were both seeing other people. Despite being drawn to each other, the pair didn’t pursue that initial spark.
But at the bus stop, both women were in new phases of their lives. Dr. Marshall had finished a Ph.D., and Dr. Malloy was weeks away from a move to Colorado for an assistant professorship position. They were also both single.
The two agreed to meet for drinks a few days later and chatted for hours until the bar closed. Dr. Malloy’s impending move fast-tracked their relationship. “We had a lot of pretty serious conversations really quickly to figure out: Are we going to make this big commitment flying across the country all the time to continue this?” Dr. Marshall said.
Dr. Marshall, 35, was born in Phoenix and is the director of the SFPE Foundation, a nonprofit group focused on the science of fire protection engineering. She has a bachelor’s degree in politics, philosophy, and economics from Denison University, as well as a master’s degree and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Pittsburgh.
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Dr. Malloy, 38, is a third generation New Yorker and an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has a bachelor’s degree in government from Smith College and a master’s degree and Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
On an early date touring the Carrie Furnaces — a former blast furnace in the Pittsburgh area — a guide stated inaccurate information about union membership, which Dr. Malloy politely corrected. “I was like, this is going better than I ever could’ve imagined — let me pull out some statistics about union membership, and then the person I’m on a date with is like, ‘This is so great, I love this about you,’” Dr. Malloy said, laughing. “That doesn’t happen on every date — like ‘Oh yeah, I also share your deep and abiding commitment to unions and organizing.’”
By the time Dr. Malloy moved to Colorado in August 2019, the couple had booked three months worth of plane tickets. During the pandemic, they began living together in Boulder.
When it came to marriage, it was important to the couple that Dr. Malloy proposed first. “I am more masc-presenting and Tamar is more femme-presenting,” Dr. Marshall said.
“We’d been in these relationships where because of how we look, she’d sort of been treated as ‘the man,’ and I’d been treated as ‘the woman’ — heavy finger quotes — and that’s not really true to who either of us is,” Dr. Malloy said. “We wanted to have that reflected in this important moment — for her not to be put in a position where she should be ‘the man’ and propose first.”
On June 27, 2021, during a trip to New York, Dr. Malloy proposed to Dr. Marshall at the Empire State Building, whose steel is partly made up of iron from the Carrie Furnaces. The skyscraper was aglow in rainbow colors — the proposal coincidentally landed a day after Marriage Equality Day.
“It’s too on the nose,” Dr. Malloy said. “There was a little bit of swallowing my New York pride, and doing this very cheesy thing because it was going to make her really happy.” A few days later, Dr. Marshall proposed to Dr. Malloy outside the American Museum of Natural History in the pouring rain.
The couple were legally married Dec. 30, 2023, at the Library at the Public, a restaurant and bar in Manhattan’s NoHo neighborhood. Rabbi Yael Werber of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, an L.G.B.T.Q. synagogue in New York, officiated the wedding, which had 34 guests and mainly used vendors run by women and those identifying as queer.
The venue held meaning for the couple: Dr. Marshall is a huge proponent of public libraries, and the site was named in honor of the first public library in the United States. And in an ode to Pittsburgh, the couple featured the local wedding tradition of a cookie table.
Alongside a ketubah, a traditional Jewish marriage contract, the couple had a community ketubah that wedding guests were invited to sign. This served, Dr. Marshall said, “as a reminder that the success of our marriage is not just the two of us together, but the two of us as the people who our communities have helped us become.”
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