The first time Courtney Porter noticed Ray Harlequin was in 2007, when they were both 13, as he stared at her across a Sabbath school classroom in Brooklyn.

“I didn’t even know who this boy was,” Porter said, laughing.

Harlequin, a software engineer, recalled that many of his church friends considered Porter “the girl everyone wanted to talk to, but no one had the courage to.” When he finally did, he found their conversations easy.

That teenage spark eventually led to a love story that came full circle more than a decade later.

Porter, raised in Uniondale, and Harlequin, who moved from Georgetown, Guyana, to East Flatbush at age 6, grew up attending Mount of Olives Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Brooklyn . They dated briefly as teens but drifted apart.

In 2017, after exchanging the

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