LET’S FACE IT, IT’S LOVE
His secret crush on Facebook colleague blossomed into status update — married
Amber Saloner, 30, and AJ Tennant, 27, have taken social media relationship statuses to a whole new level. They are not only in a relationship on Facebook; they are in a relationship at Facebook.
Both Saloner and Tennant work for the Menlo Park social media giant, and it was there that they met, dated and fell in love. But, as Saloner recalls, it wasn’t exactly love at first sight. First Tennant had to get her to accept his real-life friend request.
The pair met in 2010 while working on the same Facebook project team, but she was living in Palo Alto and he was helping establish the company’s office in Austin, Texas. On one of her business trips to Austin — while walking out of the office and talking on her cell phone — Saloner was distracted by someone running after her. It was Tennant, who interrupted her call to introduce himself.
“I had a crush on her,” Tennant said. “But she didn’t even know me.”
Tennant texted Saloner to invite her out for drinks on her next trip to Austin. She said no.
“We were going to see each other the next morning at work, and I didn’t know why we needed to get together before that,” she said.
Later, on a work phone call, Tennant asked Saloner how things were going outside of work. “It was the first time it dawned on me that he might have a crush,” she said. “But on my side, it was completely platonic.”
Over time, Saloner did develop feelings toward Tennant, but they weren’t feelings of love: He brought out her competitive streak. She has a bachelor’s degree and a business master’s from Stanford, while he was a recent Harvard grad. She was senior to him at work, but it didn’t stop him from taking her on when they disagreed about their project.
After one such confrontation, Saloner expressed her concerns to Tennant’s boss, and the boss responded by giving him a business management book to read. He read it and made himself a to-do list in the margin. At the top of the list he wrote, “Talk to Amber about
“He really opened up that night, and I saw him through a different lens. It occurred to me that this could be something more. It could be something really special.”
Amber Saloner
working relationship.”
He never had the chance to act on his list. Saloner left the project team.
In June 2011, however, Tennant was visiting the Menlo Park office when Saloner happened to organize a happy hour. She invited him to join the group at San Francisco’s Fly Bar. They started talking and didn’t stop until they were the last two people in the bar.
“He really opened up that night, and I saw him through a different lens,” Saloner said. “It occurred to me that this could be something more. It could be something really special.”
Tennant returned to Austin but came back to the Bay Area to celebrate Saloner’s birthday later that month. He invited her to visit him in early July, which she did, but instead of his house, Saloner ended up staying with him in the hospital.
Just before Saloner’s arrival, Tennant got a large splinter in his foot at a lake. The wound became infected and resulted in blood poisoning, requiring a four-day hospital stay. Not the most romantic place to spend their first weekend as a couple in Austin, but it was enough. After that, Tennant and Saloner spent every weekend together, taking turns flying between Austin and San Francisco.
After four months of their long-distance romance, Tennant was tired of racking up frequent-flier miles. He had planned to transfer back to the Bay Area last December but sped up the process and moved in with Saloner by October.
The couple decided to ring in the new year in a country Saloner had always wanted to visit: Bhutan. Saloner liked the country’s national happiness metrics and told Tennant she wanted to visit “the happiest place on Earth.”
On the plane, they talked about getting married, and Saloner said she envisioned it happening sometime in the next few years. Tennant agreed, never letting on that he had a ring in his suitcase.
On Dec. 30, they hiked to a Bhutanese mountaintop and camped overnight. In addition to the ring, Tennant secretly hauled a bottle of Champagne up the mountainside in his backpack. The next morning at dawn — the last sunrise of 2011 — he dropped to one knee.
Tennant and Saloner said “I do,” over Labor Day weekend at Sonoma’s Viansa Winery. The bridesmaids wore dresses from Weddington Way, an online service that lets bridesmaids order dresses customized to their styles and measurements in the color and fabric of the bride’s choosing. One of Saloner’s business school classmates and bridesmaids, Ilana Stern, founded the company, and she helped the wedding party find green dresses that would pay tribute to Tennant’s favorite sports team, the Boston Celtics.
Two days after the wedding, the couple enjoyed another milestone — two weeks unplugged from work while they honeymooned in the islands of French Polynesia. But before falling asleep on their wedding night, they had one more Facebook task to complete. They logged in and changed their statuses to “Married.”