Hedge Fund Manager Takes Page From "Love Actually" Playbook For Marriage Proposal
Tremblant Capital Group founder Brett Barakett almost didn't get married to Meaghan Jarensky, thanks to an absolutely terrifying ex-girlfriend who should be kept far away from the internet, kitchen knives, and pet rabbits, if she is not already.
They fell quickly and hard for each other, but that December, as he sat in a doctor’s waiting room reviewing email on his phone, Mr. Barakett, who had signed up with Match.com when his marriage was crumbling, was stopped cold when he saw an update from the site pushing a profile of someone who resembled Ms. Jarensky to a T. “Everything but her name,” he said. The profile claimed to be “looking for Mr. Big,” from someone nicknamed 1078YOGI, and had Ms. Jarensky’s photo on it along with other familiar details like her birthday and devotion to yoga. It listed the many ways she expected to be pampered. “You take me to fancy places,” she wrote. “You give me expensive gifts. You give me a credit card and let me go on shopping sprees.” Reading no further than the intro, he fired off an angry text to Ms. Jarensky, wanting to know, “When were you going to tell me you were on Match.com?” She said she had no idea what he was talking about and insisted that she had never used the site...As Mr. Barakett suspected, the perpetrator was a former girlfriend.
With Bunny Boiler 2.0 in the past, Barakett set the wheels in motion to make it official with Jarensky, looking to a character in a Hugh Grant movie for inspiration.
He planned on proposing last year on her birthday, Oct. 31. But as they passed Lexington and 57th Street the week before, his resolve melted when she chirped, “Oh, it’s our corner.” “I couldn’t wait anymore,” he said, whipping out 18 flash cards he had modeled after a scene in “Love Actually,” her favorite movie. The last card read, “Will you marry me?”
