Deepa Dhore and Thomas McGowan found themselves planning a wedding in Mexico that drew from several places at once: the city where they met, the lives they had built in New York, the cultural traditions they wanted to honour and the habits that had shaped their relationship. The result was a celebration at Rosewood Mayakoba that felt highly personal without becoming overdesigned.
Dhore and McGowan live in Manhattan, where she works in venture capital and he in investment banking. “Keeping our deals from overlapping,” they say, has become a shorthand for how they manage a shared life alongside demanding careers. Friends describe Dhore as “driven and energetic” and McGowan as “calm, grounded, with funny one-liners.” Together, they are “competitive in the best way,” always challenging one another but “deeply supportive through it all.”
Their story began at Vanderbilt in Nashville with what was meant to be a passing errand. “During the first week of school, one of my classmates asked me to casually find out if Tom was single,” Dhore recalls. “What started as a mission quickly turned into an interesting conversation.” A friendship took shape first. The coincidences came later. They had both grown up in Wilton, Connecticut, a town of fewer than 20,000 people, without ever meeting. Even their phone numbers shared the same area code. Years later, meeting in a different city felt, as they put it, “guided by an invisible string years in the making.”
After an accounting exam, McGowan asked Dhore to lunch. From there, the relationship settled into place gradually. In New York, their lives ran at a sharper pace, but the rhythm of the relationship held in smaller habits: Chinese takeout on Fridays, tennis on Saturdays and the occasional Sunday spent making TikToks at Dhore’s insistence. “Through it all, we never stopped choosing each other in small, consistent ways,” Dhore says. “After long days at the office, the only thing we ever really wanted was to see each other and unwind together,” they add. “In a city as fast-paced as Manhattan, those moments became our constant.”
The proposal happened in Tenerife. A walk turned into a spontaneous football match. McGowan won. Dhore, annoyed, walked ahead in silence. “What she didn’t realise was that I had been carrying the ring with me the entire time,” says McGowan. He stopped, knelt and proposed. “The moment felt incredibly magical but also completely true to us,” Dhore says, “rooted in playfulness and competition.
