Oklahoma Couple Weds at Starbucks
A Tulsa, Okla., couple whose love story started over a cup of coffee looked no further than their local Starbucks when it came time to tie the knot.
"We fell in love over conversations of coffee," bride Eva McCarthy Capparello said.
The bride and groom, Carmine Capparello, said "I do" Tuesday at their favorite Starbucks, which moved out the displays to make room for the bridal party and 50 guests.
The couple met on a dating site in 2008, but for two years built a friendship online, trading emails and messages. It wasn't until the spring of 2010 that they met in person - for coffee, of course, and clicked.
"We were friends. We would meet up for coffee, talk and talk for hours and hours over coffee," Eva Capparello said. "We hung out like that until we just fell in love."
Starting something serious wasn't something they had planned. Carmine Capparello, a member of the U.S. Navy, was being deployed to Iraq for 15 months that summer.
"We didn't want to get involved in a relationship," he said. "We were fighting the feelings that we both had."
"I couldn't take it anymore. I told him that I loved him. I told him I'd wait for him," she said.
Capparello proposed in May 2010 and then left for Iraq in June, forcing the couple to put their coffee dates on hold.
"When he was in Iraq, my mom and I met at that particular Starbucks every Tuesday night for coffee. That's what kept me grounded," Eva said. "I got to talk about the ups and downs of life. That's why that Starbucks was so important for me and us."
The bride bonded with baristas and found camaraderie with other customers at Starbucks while she got her coffee without Capparello. When he returned in June 2011 and they began to make wedding plans, the duo approached Starbucks.
"They were so excited," Eva Capparello recalled, and "for them to close the store was a huge revenue loss."
The store, located at 51st and Harvard in Tulsa, closed for the occasion and gave the bride free reign to decorate.
"They took the artwork off the walls and we put up some of our own photos. They moved the displays out," Eva said. "We still wanted it to be a Starbucks, but with a personal touch of ours."
Even though it was Starbucks, the bride didn't skimp on details, choosing to wear the traditional white dress, have a 10-person bridal party alongside them and feature an impressive cake. For the father-daughter dance, they headed out to the parking lot.
"It was amazing," she said. "It was intimate, comfortable, everything we wanted."
The newlywed coffee lovers took off for Destin, Fla., for their honeymoon Wednesday morning. Before they left on their road trip, they shared their first official cup of coffee as a married couple.
