Josh Radnor and Jordana Jacobs were married outdoors this month, in the middle of a blizzard, as 164 of their snow-soaked guests shivered in the 20-degree evening air as Dr. Jacobs read a 10-minute monologue about her lover and Mr. Radnor responded. With a 10-minute monologue.
Extraordinary circumstances were not strange to the couple, as they fell in love with each other while stumbling upon mushrooms.
It was February 2022, and Dr. Jacobs, a clinical psychologist, and Mr. Radnor, an actor and musician, were at a sound meditation retreat in upstate New York, with about 30 other people. There, they ingested a narcotic mixture before lying on the floor on either side of a large room. Masks covered their eyes as they listened to the singing bowls and bells.
That’s when Mr. Radnor and Dr. Jacobs slid into each other’s subconscious DMs.
Radnor, now 49, said a voice told him: “This is her.” “This is your woman.”
Across the room and in the psilocybin-containing object, Dr. Jacobs, 36, was having a conversation with her heart.
“What do you have to tell me?” I asked that.
“Do you know that guy in the other room, Josh?” He replied. “You’re attracted to him.”
They had met the day before, at the beginning of a three-day retreat centered around a meditation “ceremony.”
Mr. Radnor, the star of the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” and who recently appeared in the Hulu series “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” had been processing a painful breakup a few months ago. He moved from his home in Los Angeles to his parents’ house in Columbus, Ohio, to an Airbnb in Nashville, where he was recording an album with friends. Then he arrived in New York for the weekend for an extensive self-evaluation.
Dr. Jacobs lives in Brooklyn, a subway ride from her close-knit family. She is a clinical psychologist and has a private practice there. She graduated from Tufts University and received her doctorate in clinical psychology from Long Island University in Brooklyn.
She said she made the trip upstate this weekend as well because “those experiences were so powerful for me in understanding who I am.” She too was recovering from a broken relationship and decided that this weekend would signal a new, less cerebral direction in which she would be guided by her heart.
The night before the meditation session, she and Mr. Radnor talked for half an hour. “We just fell in for a really easy and fun get-to-know-you session,” he said.
They talked about love and death, and the connection between them, which Dr. Jacobs told him she had studied. But she told him she feared her style was too “academic and intellectual.”
“I need more experience in both,” she said. Mr. Radnor was fascinated. “I thought it was evidence of true depth,” he said. “I thought it was tremendous.”
They discussed his songwriting, which also incorporates themes of love and death, including for an album he was recording in Nashville, which he eventually called “Eulogy.” Dr. Jacobs felt the spark, too.
Every couple has a version of courtship. This was for them.
After their psychedelic experience, as part of Dr. Jacobs’ new commitment to being guided by her emotions, she feels obligated to tell Mr. Radnor that she likes him.
She patted him on the shoulder. She said to him shyly: “I had this experience at the ceremony of listening to my heart, and my heart is drawn to you.”
“You came for me at the ball too, but I’m not prepared to talk about it,” answered Mr. Radnor, who felt a little alarmed at the feelings stirring within him.
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Within minutes of leaving the resort, he was ready. “Hi, I’m Josh Radnor,” he texted her.
This began a recent month-long epistolary courtship. They discussed their families – their parents had long, successful marriages. She has three brothers, and he has two sisters.
They talked about her career and his creative efforts to escape the shadow cast by the long-running hit sitcom. Dr. Jacobs, a TV buff, said she had never watched “How I Met Your Mother,” which impressed Mr. Radnor. “Fame robs you of the ability to make a first impression,” he said.
They talked, texted, and sent voice memos. “We were always in touch, sharing things we wrote and things we made,” he said. “Thoughts, feelings and visions.”
Weeks later, Mr. Radnor was cast in Fleishman Is in Trouble, which was filming in New York. He sublet a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn and invited Dr. Jacobs to meet him for dinner.
“We had a really beautiful, intense, powerful first date where we really delved into it,” she said.
Later that night, Mr. Radnor had what he called a “hangover of weakness” and told her that “my walls had gone up.”
Instead of feeling rejected, Dr. Jacobs was touched by his honesty. “For me, he showed me that he could handle me in that moment and tell me what was happening to him,” she said. “I just loved it.”
They have become inseparable. He officially moved from Los Angeles to Brooklyn. She became infatuated with his labradoodle, Nelson the Terrier. Within months, they were discussing marriage.
“Actors and psychiatrists,” said Gillian Sturtevant, Dr. Jacobs’ close high school friend, explaining the couple’s compatible tendency to talk (and talk) about their feelings.
They got engaged one May morning in Joshua Tree, California. First, they meditated. Mr. Radnor then casually suggested that they write love letters to each other. He ended his speech with a suggestion.
Their friends view them as a perfect match. “They are in a permanent dorm situation that most adults abandon after graduation,” said Elliott Holt, a fiction writer who attended Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, with Mr. Radnor.
The couple decided to have a January wedding in New York, before Mr. Radnor began rehearsals for “The Ally,” a new play that opens in February at the Public Theater.
They settled on a location: Cedar Lakes Estate, a former summer camp converted into an event space in Port Jervis, New York. The only available date that worked for the couple was the third anniversary of the attack on the US Capitol. “We decided to rebrand on January 6,” Mr. Radnor said.
Since their relationship began at a sound meditation ceremony, they planned their wedding weekend to reflect the concept of “set and setting,” which, in a psychedelic context, refers to the interplay between an individual’s emotional and mental state and the physical environment.
The night before the wedding, there was a dinner with decorative mushrooms integrated into the centerpieces and at least one speech referencing Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. (There were only seven therapists present from Dr. Jacobs’ family.) The guests wrote their intentions on cards and threw them into the fire.
Mr. Radnor strummed his guitar — the only other sound was the crackle of burning wood — as he sang lyrics he wrote for his bride: “One day, all of this will be gone, and what will remain are the songs I sang to you.”
On the morning of the wedding, there was yoga and then sound meditation (no drugs). And then – in the couple’s most significant attempt to stimulate the senses – the ceremony was called to be performed outside in the bitter cold at dusk.
Not even the snowstorm, which meteorologists had been predicting for days, could thwart the couple’s intentions. So their guests gathered their clothes and headed out into the evening storm.
The couple said they made a mistake in their calculations when they thought that heavy snowfall would start later than it did. “The snow was two things,” Mr. Radnor said. “Cold and disturbing, but also cosmic and divine.”
Neither slippery driving conditions nor bits of ice accumulated on hairstyles and beards can keep their guests away. “We’re like the post office,” said Alyson Hannigan, her How I Met Your Mother co-star along with the groom.
Pamela Freeman, the sitcom’s director, had one request. “When they renew their vows, maybe they can do it in the spring,” she said.
In a flash attack of large, sparkling snowflakes, the bride, groom, their siblings, and their parents were able to walk down the aisle without falling.
The bride promised to give space to her groom. “My first pledge is freedom,” she told him, “which also means that we are free to stay, or — if this relationship develops in a way that no longer serves our best interests — we are free to leave.” “We know that it is choice, not obligation, that makes us want to stay exactly where we are.”
The groom cried as he pledged himself. He said: “I look endlessly into your green eyes, and I know that my lack of marriage until now was not due to some brokenness inside me.” He added: “The truth is that I have not gotten married yet because I was waiting for you.”
The ceremony included Jewish wedding traditions and was officiated by Jacob Aziah, a friend of the couple who is a minister of the Universal Life Church.
As guests melted ice around a large indoor fireplace, the newlyweds fanned the bride’s snow-soaked hair, while the groom, in his first official act as a husband, knelt at her feet and warmed them with a hairdryer. .
Back at the candlelit inn, the reception began. Nine friends and relatives gave speeches as the snow continued to fall, and those who were not among the 115 guests planning to stay in cabins at the venue overnight checked and rechecked weather and traffic apps on their phones.
Dr. Jacobs and Mr. Radnor tried to focus on the speeches and let the wedding planner and venue staff handle the logistics. “But we felt the pressure in the room strongly,” Dr. Jacobs said.
At about 10:30 p.m., a venue employee made an announcement: the roads were not passable and everyone would need to spend the night. This included guests, the 10 members of the wedding band, event planners, venue staff, and a New York Times reporter and photographer, for a total of 59 additional people.
Some were assigned loft beds in rooms rented by friends of the couple for the weekend, while others slept in the venue’s owner’s on-site residence.
“Once it was announced that no one was leaving here tonight, people went into a kind of capitulation,” Radnor said. The band started playing the Beatles song “Oh! Dear” and the newlyweds danced with abandon.
“It was as similar to a psychedelic ceremony as possible,” Dr. Jacobs said.
On this day
when January 6, 2024
where Cedar Lakes Estate, Port Jervis, New York
On the eve of the previous night Two nights before the wedding, Mr. Radnor and Dr. Jacobs dined alone in a heated conservatory with views of the wedding venue property. Dr. Jacobs surprised Mr. Radnor with a collection of audio memos from when they were dating. “It was so special to hear these past versions of ourselves getting to know each other,” he said. “Then we look across the table and realize where we were — moments away from marriage.”
Wedding swag Guests received welcome bags containing incense sticks, an incense dish, a CBD tincture, and an “intention kit” containing pen and paper. “We’ve found that setting intention can be a helpful way to access your inner compass and calibrate it toward true north,” the instructions say.
The man is the best man Nelson the dog, the couple’s Labradoodle, served as an honorary groomsman (wearing a burgundy tie) and was walked down the aisle by Seth Jacobs, one of Dr. Jacobs’ brothers.