I Do!: Alexa Signorile and Tyler McMurray

When Alexa Signorile and Tyler McMurray met in July 2014, during their second week at the University of Alabama, they knew they had a connection.

“We just have had unbreakable chemistry from the first day we met,” said Signorile, 27, a speech pathologist originally from Mt. Sinai. “It’s like I’ve known him my whole life.”

The two were best friends for a couple years and then, she said, McMurray, an Alabama native, “asked me out one day.”

After college, the couple’s careers took them in different directions: McMurray’s job as a project engineer sent him to Tennessee, Iowa and Nebraska, while Signorile remained in Tuscaloosa for graduate school. But the two stayed together despite the distance.

“We both kind of knew we couldn’t live without each other at that point,” Signorile said. “We were just at different phases of life: I was in graduate school. He was traveling for work. We were 21.”

Signorile briefly moved back home in 2020, then headed to Nashville for work. McMurray would visit every weekend, driving five hours each way from St. Louis, where he attended graduate school at Washington University, Signorile said.

The couple got engaged on March 19, 2022, in Signorile’s hometown, with her family looking on from a distance. And in May of that year, they finally reunited in St. Louis, where they live now.

“Alexa’s smile, laugh and warmth captivated me from the day I met her,” McMurray, 28, an associate at McKinsey & Company, wrote in an email. “I felt like I had known her forever and I never wanted to know a life without her."

The couple wed on June 9, 2023. There were 150 guests, including six bridesmaids and 10 additional friends who helped Signorile get ready.

People came from 18 states, partly due to the friendships the peripatetic couple developed over their long courtship.

“It was really important to me just to be able to spend time with these people who came so far to be at the wedding,” Signorile said.

The couple exchanged vows on the beach on a day that started off hazy. But, said Signorile, “Right before the wedding ceremony started, the skies cleared up.”