Their backgrounds, however, were vastly different.
“We grew up incredibly poor,” Ms. Matteson, a social worker in the Argyle, Texas, school district, said. She and her three siblings moved around the West Coast frequently with their mother, until she was placed in foster care as an adolescent. After aging out of foster care, she won grants to attend the Texas Woman’s University, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in social work in 2011. She then earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2014.
Ms. Matteson now considers her friends her chosen family, whereas Ms. Winget treats her family like friends. When she asked Ms. Matteson to have drinks with her the day of her missed flight at Miss Angeline’s, a restaurant in Denton, Texas, Ms. Winget also invited her sister, brother-in-law and mother. “We’re very close,” she said, adding, “I’m a big believer in failing fast. I was feeling really good about Sarah, and I was like, let me see if they feel really good about her, too.”
They did. Within a month, Ms. Winget quit the Nevada company to form her own private equity firm, Alternative Wealth Partners, in Dallas. In October, Ms. Matteson and her children moved into Ms. Winget’s house in Oak Point, Texas. The following year, the couple built a new house in Argyle, so Ms. Matteson’s children could keep attending public school in that district.
The two had been floating the idea of getting married for months, until finally they exchanged custom engagement rings and handwritten cards proposing to each other on March 14, 2022, during a trip to the Château de Chenonceau in Loire Valley, France. Ms. Matteson’s ring is a rose gold, pink sapphire and diamond ring, and Ms. Winget’s is a white gold, turquoise and diamond ring. Two weddings followed the joint proposal.
On June 16, they were legally married at Flippen Park in Highland Park, Texas, in an intimate ceremony by Ms. Winget’s sister, Alison Winget, who became a Universal Life Church minister for the event. On June 24, Ms. Winget’s longtime friend Mario Nguyen led a ceremony for 38 family members and close friends at Chateau de Puits es Pratx in Ginestas, France.
The couple shared how the weddings felt like an extension of their relationship: fun and familiar. “We’re really, really happy,” Ms. Matteson said.