COM graduates wed at BU Beach 11 years after meeting on campus

They’ve known each other since just before their freshman year, but 2013 Boston University alumni Casey Rabin and Andrew Feldman didn’t fall in love until after graduation. Saturday, the two will wed on the BU Beach — the site where they first met.

The ceremony will involve only immediate family as well as the pair’s best friends, who will serve as co-officiators. COVID-19 had uprooted previous plans of a full wedding party, which is now postponed to October of next year, but Rabin said they were determined to still marry this year.

Both born and raised in Westchester County, N.Y., Rabin and Feldman missed many chances to run into each other before BU ultimately brought them together.

“Our high schools played each other in sports, competed against each other in things like Mock Trial and Model UN, but we never met each other,” Feldman said. “We grew up about 20 miles away.”

The couple’s first encounter occurred during BU’s First-Year Student Outreach Program, a week-long volunteering experience offered annually to incoming students before classes begin. At the time, neither expected to play such an integral role in the other’s life.

After FYSOP, the journalism students would run into each other in the hallways of the College of Communication and soon developed mutual friends. They found a common denominator in Daniel Zaltz.

Having known Rabin since he was three years old, Zaltz said she was the first friend he made when his family moved to the United States. It wasn’t until freshman year of college that he met Feldman.

“It’s really funny, Casey is my oldest friend,” Zaltz said. “And then Andrew was the closest friend I made in college and to this day is like my brother.”

Upon graduation, Rabin and Feldman moved separately to New York City to pursue their careers — and landed four blocks apart in Manhattan. Naturally, they began attending parties and dinners together, as well as sharing a taxi when convenient.

“I think I probably got the feels first. It was just so easy with him,” Rabin said. “When I was with him, it felt very natural and very comfortable.”

As they spent more time together, Rabin began considering the possibility of a more romantic relationship with Feldman. That’s when she knew she “must have liked him to some extent,” Rabin said. She recalls posing the hypothetical in a cab one night:

“I just sort of blurted out to him, ‘Would you ever envision us dating?’” Rabin said. “And he just looked at me, he was shocked, and was like, ‘Yes.’”

It wasn’t until 2018 when the relationship officially began. To Zaltz, what stands out about the couple’s dynamic is their talkative nature and the humor they bring to the conversation.

“It’s hard to get a word in when you’re with the two of them,” Zaltz said. “I think they play off of each other’s energy and sort of do an Abbott and Costello two-part comedy skit together.”

Sports politics played heavily into the way Rabin and Feldman bonded early on in their relationship, Zaltz said. He remembers watching a Philadelphia Eagles vs. New York Giants football game with the couple.

Rabin was rooting for the Giants while Feldman, a major Eagles fan, was trying to persuade her to change her allegiance. Zaltz said he watched the two give each other a glance and share a “very genuine moment.”

“I saw Casey basically decide more important than the Giants was Andrew, and so in that moment, she just moved a little bit closer to him on the couch and said, ‘For you and your family, I’m an Eagles fan,’” Zaltz said. “And then from there on, that’s when we knew it was going to be real.”

Feldman proposed to Rabin about a year and a half into the relationship, though he said the decision had been on his mind since their seventh or eighth month together.

“Probably about a month or two after moving in with her,” Feldman said, “I knew that this was it for me.”

He traveled with Rabin to Florida, where he took her parents out to lunch and asked for their blessing. “He said beautiful things,” said Casey Rabin’s mother, Nancy Rabin.

Her father, Corey Rabin, had first met Feldman at a barbecue in the Rabins’ backyard, before the couple began dating. Corey Rabin said he found Feldman immediately engaging.

“I said to myself, ‘This is the guy she should be dating,’” Corey Rabin said. “And it ended up that that did unfold over the course of the next several months.”

On Mother’s Day 2019, the scoreboards in a near-empty Yankee Stadium displayed the question, “Casey, will you marry me?” Surrounded by close family, Casey Rabin said yes.

“Casey, for as long as I’ve known her, has wanted to be proposed to at Yankee Stadium,” Zaltz said. “I’ve known that about her since she was like seven.”

Coming from a family of New York Yankees fans, Rabin had worked for the Yankees for five years and frequently attends the team’s spring training games. Feldman, however, is a fan of their rival New York counterpart.

“I do hate the Yankees. I’m a huge Mets fan,” Feldman said. “But I love her. Casey trumps my hatred for the Yankees.”

The couple’s shared upbringing in Westchester factored into their initial choice of a fall wedding on the Hudson River. This time of year was a favorite for them, Feldman said, because growing up, they loved the sight of leaves changing hues around the water.

As the pandemic ramped up in April, however, Feldman said they realized a large wedding this year would likely not be feasible. The couple decided to push their celebration to 2021 but hold the legal ceremony on their original date — this time, on the campus where it all started.

Besides being able to call Rabin his wife, Feldman said he is also looking forward to starting a family with her after marriage.

“Even though we might not be perfect as individuals,” Feldman said, “I think as a couple, in terms of balancing each other out, we’re pretty damn near perfect.”