Wedding bells will ring next week for two Philadelphia residents who met at a staple in the Gayborhood.
Randy Branin, 42, and Gonzalo Ramirez, 29, met four years ago at Woody’s. The pair will have a ceremony at 7 p.m. Nov. 2 at Morning Glory Diner, 735 S. 10th St., and will have a legal wedding ceremony Nov. 6 in Delaware.
On the night they met, Brennan said he was first taken by Ramirez’s looks.
“I thought he was very sexy and very good looking,” Branin, a New Jersey native, said.
Ramirez, who is originally from Mexico City, played coy at first to Branin’s approach.
“I thought the same thing about him but I didn’t call him when he gave me his phone number,” Ramirez said. “I told him I would call him and then I threw his number right in the trash. So then the next time I saw him, I said, ‘Let’s talk’ and that was that.”
The pair moved in together shortly after and, about a year after they began dating, Branin gave Ramirez a ring on Christmas Day.
Branin is a restaurant server and Ramirez works in catering, and they are raising Ramirez’s 5-year-old son.
Ramirez said his relationship with Branin is based on trust.
“With him, I feel very safe,” Ramirez said.
For Branin, he said it was the end of the journey to find “the one.”
“Instead of running around like a crazy person, I learned that there was somebody out there that was good,” he said.
The two decided to take the next step in their relationship after a wave of states legalized same-sex marriage.
“Now that Delaware says yes, New York said yes and now New Jersey has said yes, it was time that we got married,” Branin said. “We wanted to do it in Pennsylvania but, sadly, it is not legal here, but we have a home in Delaware, so we figured that would be a good place.”
Branin said he and Ramirez are among a sea of local couples heading to neighboring states like Delaware to have their unions sanctioned.
“We had conversations with the person who did the papers for the wedding and she said she couldn’t believe the amount of people coming from Philadelphia to Delaware to get married,” he said. “She said the revenue Philadelphia and the state in general was missing was just unbelievable.”
The pair started officially planning for their wedding six months ago and mostly everything has fallen into place — except for the dessert.
“The place is OK, the invitations are OK, the music is OK but it is just the wedding cake,” Ramirez joked. “We’ve been fighting over what kind of cake we want and especially me because I am the dessert guy.”
But that detail will be overshadowed by the overarching meaning of the day.
“All that matters is how much we love each other,” Branin said.
