The wedding of Erin Surette and Jason Dembeck

Even after dozens of hours in his presence, there was only so much Erin Surette knew about Jason Dembeck: He had a gentle manner, musical tastes that matched her own and no apparent need for idle chatter.

And she knew that she felt something for Dembeck, the Baltimore yoga instructor whose classes she faithfully attended throughout 2008.
“I felt like we would have a lot in common,” says Surette, a competitive runner who took up yoga after being sidelined with an injury.
Her interest grew profound, but Surette, a pathologist’s assistant who is intensely shy, felt hamstrung. He could have a girlfriend, she reasoned, and maybe all his female students had similar crushes.
“I didn’t really know how to approach it,” she says.
Eventually Surette worked up the nerve to ask Dembeck for help with a pose after class, but that was the extent of their personal interactions.

Still, it was a bigger move than he’d been able to muster. Dembeck, who also works as an accountant, was struck by the grace of Surette’s practice. He was attracted to the lithe brunette, but knew even less of her than she did of him.
Nervous butterflies struck whenever he saw her; on one occasion, he decided to talk to her after class, but then “I chickened out and didn’t say anything,” he recalls.
In January 2009, Dembeck opened a new branch of Lifeline Power Yoga, the studio where he taught in Baltimore’s Fells Point. The first time Surette went to a class there on her own, she was the only student to show up.
Equal parts ecstatic and unnerved, she wondered, How am I not going to act totally awkward? They went ahead with class and afterward she complimented his playlist, which featured some of her favorite indie bands. They chatted about yoga and running, and Surette promised to follow up with information about an upcoming race.
They traded e-mails in the weeks that followed, with Dembeck always including questions to keep the dialogue going.
He was increasingly convinced that they had a connection and felt deflated whenever he saw that she’d attended another teacher’s class. Heeding the advice of his friends, Dembeck, now 31, resolved to ask her out.
“The general consensus was, ‘She likes you and if you don’t do anything, she’s gonna take that as a hint,’ ” he says.
After class in February, Surette, 29, changed clothes to go to a pub trivia event. When Dembeck asked if she was going out, Surette took a deep breath, said yes and that he should come along.
“That was probably the most I’d ever put myself out there,” she says.
He had another class to teach that night, but told her he’d been meaning to ask if she wanted to do something over the weekend.
On a Friday night, they went to dinner and the symphony. Before the evening ended, he asked if she’d like to go to the roller derby the next day. Soon they were spending every weekend together and meeting up for class during the week.
“I was just amazed at how compatible we were and how similar we were,” he says. Dembeck, who can be a solitary person, especially on tough days, was even more amazed to find that, during a particularly difficult week, he wanted to be with her more than he wanted to be alone. “That’s when I thinking, ‘Erin’s the person.’ ”
They moved in together that October, constructing a life of long runs, early bedtimes and regular yoga sessions in an extra bedroom they’d converted into a small studio. The following July, he laid rose petals along her yoga mat and proposed as she unrolled it.
The two began planning a big wedding but were turned off by the commercialism and the thought of being the center of such attention for a full weekend. Just after Christmas they decided to elope, but, heeding protests from their parents, amended their plans to include immediate family.
So on Feb. 20, exactly two years after their first date, Surette and Dembeck exchanged vows in a small room at Chase Court in Baltimore. There were surrounded by arched windows and applauded by eight guests.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt more comfortable with anyone,” Surette said the week before the ceremony. “It’s just so easy.”
Dembeck concurred. The initial overtures were tricky, he says, “but once we finally crossed that, it was so easy just to talk.”