A beautiful, blended family

He fell in love with her voice.

It was spring 2019, and they were coworkers at New Jersey’s Division of Child Protection and Permanency, seated just two rows apart. Theo knew Farran’s older sister. They quickly discovered that Game of Thrones was a shared preoccupation.

Then Theo came across Farran’s Instagram page, with links to videos of her singing. “From that point on, I was infatuated with her,” he says. “Regular conversations turned into flirting and led to us dating.”

Farran, with characteristic bluntness, asked one day, “Are you flirting with me because you just want to hook up with someone from the office?” Theo demurred: “No, that’s not it.”

As they continued their courtship, trying to dodge the office rumors that began to fly, Farran was drawn to Theo’s silliness and his obvious affection for his sons, who shuttled back and forth between his place and his ex-wife’s. “He would talk about the kids; he’d send me videos of them. I could tell he was really involved in their lives — not just a weekend dad.”

For Theo, Farran’s goofiness was also a draw. So was her frankness and insight. Early in their relationship, he recalls, “She said, ‘You can stop wearing your mask. You wear this mask to hide your pain.’ No one had ever said that to me, not even my mother. I thought: Wow. This woman can see something in me that no one else can.”

Still, he waited a few months to introduce Farran to his sons. When that happened, he says, “She instantly clicked with them” by joining in their video game of the moment. “My youngest curled up with her. I knew then: I couldn’t live without this woman.”

But at the time, Theo says now, he wasn’t sure how to live with himself. After 10 years of marriage and four years post-divorce, he was still forming his own identity, apart from a relationship. He broke up with Farran toward the end of 2019; the two reunited for a few months before he ended the relationship a second time.

“I stopped talking to him for a little bit,” Farran recalls. Still, she couldn’t forget the sudden certainty — a voice from God? — that she’d had on one of the first occasions they met, at work. “I walked past him one day and had the thought: What if that’s your husband?”

That memory, along with her mother’s gentle counsel to “let’s just see; you never know” helped Farran decide how to respond when Theo continued to reach out. “I cautiously gave him one more chance. I could tell that he’d changed. It took time to get back, to trust him with my heart, but I haven’t doubted him since then.”

By fall 2020, they were living together in the two-bedroom apartment Theo had rented that summer. Cohabitation meant adjusting the “Fun Dad” habits Theo had acquired with the boys: limitless video game playing and a weekend diet of apple juice and Skittles. “When Farran came in, she was like, ‘Whoa. That’s too much video game time, and the Skittles have got to go.’ ”

“I helped provide some structure,” Farran says; she required the boys to sit at the table for meals and put some brakes on their screen time. “I wasn’t officially their stepmom, but I assumed the role.”

Occasionally, the boys would ask, “Dad, when are you and Miss Farran going to be married?” His answer: I didn’t propose yet.

He did so in July 2021, on the Burlington waterfront where they’d had their first date, interrupting a post-dinner argument to say, “Farran, I brought you out here because I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” Then he reached into the bag he’d been carrying all night — she’d teased him about it, calling it his “satchel” — for the ring.

They hoped to marry at an outdoor pavilion in Delran. But two days before the wedding, there was a deluge of rain, and workers began digging around the site. In haste, they found a vacant bank building in Trenton — high ceilings, waxed floors — that they were able to use at no charge.

“Before we got married, she said, ‘You better cry when I walk down the aisle,’ ” Theo says. “I said, ‘I’m a thug. I’m not crying.’ ” But when Farran began walking toward him, arm in arm with her 78-year-old father, the voice singing “You Are So Beautiful” struck Theo as stunningly familiar.

“It was her. She’d recorded herself singing that song. It sent a chill down my body, and I started tearing up. The voice that drew me to her was the voice singing to me as my bride was walking toward me.”

Tyler and Trey were best men, with Tyler gripping the ring box tightly. Trey couldn’t wait to call Farran Mom. And shortly after they married, he began asking about a sibling. “When are you guys going to have a baby?” he often queries. “What are we going to name our baby?”

The wedding gave them legal imprimatur. But becoming family, Theo and Farran say, is not a single event; rather, it’s a slow accrual of experiences, struggles, and intimacies. There was the time last summer when the four went to Wildwood and Tyler, who’s typically afraid of water, bravely dunked in the pool. And the time in Baltimore, when he clung to both Farran and Theo in the midst of a noisy crowd. And the moment when Trey first called Farran Mom in public.

Recently, Theo woke up feeling a bit unwell. While he lingered in bed, Farran got the boys up, made breakfast, and made sure they were ready for school. “She woke me up, and I was thinking: It’s 6:30, I’ve got to help her with the boys. She said, ‘I did everything. We’re getting ready to leave.’ I thought: Wow. It’s a team thing, now.”