Ogspi "JO" 2000-2009 Marriage

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"JO" 2000-2009 Marriage

JOAQUIM
JOBB
JOEST
JOHNSON JOHNSTON
JONES JONGENEELEN
JORDAN
JOSEPH
JOYCE JOYNT

JOAQUIM m@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-11-19 published
Edward Manuel CORDEIRO and Noelia Maria JOAQUIM -- Match:
By Judith TENENBAUM, Saturday,▼ November 19, 2005, Page M5
The kinks in the once-budding relationship between Nelly JOAQUIM and Ed CORDEIRO were merely bookends to their rediscovery after 26 years apart.
They had both arrived in Toronto as young children from Portugal. By their teens, he was an M.V.P. football player at Parkdale Collegiate Insitute, and she attended West Toronto Secondary School. When she was confronted by the ultimate crisis -- no date for her 1977 prom -- her cousin Lydia recruited Mr. CORDEIRO for what would play out like an episode of Happy Days.
"I got dressed up in this long, gorgeous, sexy red gown, [and] drove with my cousin and her boyfriend [future husband] Joe MELO in his Camaro over to Ed's place," she recalls.
Ed had played football, gone out for a few with the boys, and was lying down for a nap. Bedraggled, he showered and the quartet floored it to the Park Plaza Hotel, arriving late. "They set up a folding table for us smack in the middle of the dance floor," Ms. JOAQUIM recalls. "I didn't know if that was to embarrass us." If not, the table collapsing and depositing Mr. MELO's dinner in his lap sufficed.
Ms. JOAQUIM, now executive assistant to the president of Holt Renfrew, says: "Ed was good-looking, a nice guy, not the macho type, but my parents were strict and I was not allowed to date."
Using his sister as a go-between, Mr. CORDEIRO managed a handful of dates with Ms. JOAQUIM until she went abroad for a month. "I sent him a postcard, which he just found among his memorabilia," she says. "We're not sure to this day why we didn't reconnect."
During the intervening years, each followed a distinct path of marriage, family and divorce. It was Mr. MELO, their lifelong mutual friend, who served as a catalyst when he invited the pair to his pool party.
"I'm not a matchmaker," Mr. MELO says. "I didn't tell anyone in case it didn't work out, but I felt they had so much in common."
The party fell on the day of the blackout of 2003, and Ms. JOAQUIM was almost a no-show, hesitant to leave her children alone. She set out when the lights came on, not knowing her football hero would be there. "His blond hair was grey, he had a grey mustache, and I didn't recognize him until he smiled, and I thought, 'Oh my God, that's Eddie!' " she says.
"I felt the sparks and the magic," says Mr. CORDEIRO, 48. "It was an amazing evening."
But Ms. JOAQUIM had emerged from tattered relationships and admits she was mired in doubt. "I needed someone who would treat me as an equal," she says, "love me for who I am, not someone they wanted me to be."
Mr. CORDEIRO, who runs his own technology business, sought "that multidimensional relationship where you connect on all levels, and you are stronger as a team than individually."
Within two weeks, he had hurdled her barriers and professed his love. "The words just came out of my mouth and I was shocked," he says.
Their families met a month later, sharing travel and adventure over the next year. That November, as the two were celebrating Ms. JOAQUIM's 45th birthday at her favourite restaurant, Auberge du Pommier, he proposed with a poem and a diamond nestled in petals of a white rose.
The bride's vision of a tropical destination wedding was trumped by family practicality, but they transformed Sunnyside Pavilion into a Polynesian paradise. There, they recited personal vows on August 26 before Reverend Robert BUCKLEY. The attendants were the couple's children: maid of honour Melanie JOAQUIM, 21, her brother Jeffrey, 16, best man Adam CORDEIRO, 18, and his sister, Megan, 16.
"When my mother reconnected with Ed, I knew he was going to be part of our family, and [I knew] that my mom had fallen in love with him even before she did," Melanie JOAQUIM says. "She just radiated a different kind of happiness."