In June 2021, Francis Charles Marley checked out Ashleé Michele Miller’s Match.com profile, but clicked away without so much as a like. She would have let it go if the app hadn’t pictured him cradling a baby moose in the middle of a raging Alaskan river.
Ms. Miller, 35, was riding out the pandemic at her parents’ house in Reidsville, N.C., when Mr. Marley thumbed past her profile. The Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she lived, was still under Covid restrictions, and as a professional musician who specializes in music theory and clarinet performance, her life there had come to a standstill.
Her teaching gigs at the Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program and as an adjunct professor at Adelphi University and the City University of New York had moved online, and her regular performances with Miami’s Nu Deco Ensemble were being live streamed. Concerts with another ensemble, the Parhelion Trio, were on pause.
A pause from her dating apps would have been welcome, too. In New York, where she had lived since 2006, sorting through men had started to feel like a part-time job. But in North Carolina, “my mom said, ‘You have to keep dating,’” she said. “‘You can’t put it off.’” Hoping to meet someone in upstate New York, where she had recently bought a parcel of land near the Catskills to enjoy the mountains later in life, or nearby Massachusetts, she expanded her search range.
Alaska was a little farther than she would have liked. But when she saw that she had caught the eye of the man with the baby moose, fascination gripped her. “That hooked me,” she said. So she messaged him. “I said, ‘Hey, I saw you looking at my profile. I just wanted to say I think you’re really interesting.’”