Melanee & Raphe- Our Story On How We Met

The story of how we met is all about timing. Neither of us was particularly looking for any sort of relationship at the time, having both been through our fair share of bad ones. One day at the end of March 2017, Raphe got a call from a colleague to shoot a commercial project for the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills where I work. It was on this shoot that him and I met. I work as the Digital Marketing Manager for the hotel and one of the shoots for the restaurant there was scheduled for late in the evening after we were closed. My boss, not wanting to be there too late, asked me to stay and babysit the shoot. So I obliged and sat at the end of the bar as Raphe and his crew set up for the coming shots. Low and behold, as is no unfamiliar event in the film industry, the actors were taking a lot longer to get ready than anticipated so we had some time on our hands. It was in a camera test that he angled the camera on me and he told me he thought, "wow she's really pretty!" He showed me the clip and we began talking to pass the time.

I, said, "so your name is Raphe?"

Raphe having heard this about every day of his life said, "yep, and my last name is Wolfgang."

"You're name is Raphe Wolfgang!" I laughed. Like really laughed.

Seeing the opportunity he replied, "Yeah if you look me up on Facebook I'm certainly the only one." I promptly looked him up, added him as a friend, and sent a message. This message chain continued for a few days after the shoots had ended. I remember our chemistry was immediate. I laughed at all my stupid jokes, we had very similar outlooks on life, musical interests, and travel ideas, but there was just one problem; He thought, "This girl is cool, but she has to be like 26 or so, no way can I date someone so young." In one of the messages, he made some joke about feeling like an old man because my back was hurting and so I asked him his age. He said, "I'll be 36 in August." I said, "Oh, you're not that old, I'll be 36 in November."

After that, he decided to ask me on a date. We elected for some time the next week, which was tricky because he was leaving that Wednesday to Arizona for his sister's wedding. It didn't look like the timing was going to work out so he said, why don't we do something when I get back. Unbeknownst to him, this worried me, because I thought he'd just go to AZ and then never reach out again (as I mentioned we both had some bad prior experiences with dating). I asked to just do something low key, maybe that Tuesday after I went to work out if he didn't mind me showing up in workout clothes. Little did I know, this was music to his ears, girls in LA can be a little high strung, and all he desired was someone low key and down-to-earth. We settled on meeting at The Snake Pit, a dive bar on Melrose for a drink.

In Raphe's words:

I remember sitting across from her at the table and the usual nerves I felt on dates simply wasn't there. We gazed in each other's eyes and there was some deeper connection that neither of us could really explain. We parted with a long hug and I told her I'd be in touch (she still didn't believe me, thinking fully that I'd ghost her).

I drove to AZ the next day and was texting her throughout the weekend. When I returned we picked up right where we left off. From the early stages of our relationship, we both recognized what we had found in each other. The best analogy we could use was that we felt like we had won the lottery. It didn't take long for that feeling of knowing I had found the right person to sink in. And the rest, as they say, is history.