Amber & Jason

This originally ran as a Local Love in the 2024 issue.

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Wedding Date May 20, 2023

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Amber Anthony and Jason Foland met at Pikesville Middle School at the tail end of mitzvah season. “I remember this because he was on the ‘B-list’ for my bat mitzvah,” laughs Amber, events and marketing manager at Junior Achievement of Central Maryland. He may have been a mere backup guest when she turned 13, but all that changed the next school year. “He wasn’t top of mind until we ended up in the same homeroom class and I quickly became infatuated with him,” as only a lovestruck teenager can. Amber did anything and everything to make him her boyfriend that school year.

“It ended up with him telling me I was annoying, so I ignored him for two weeks straight, just to tap him on the back one morning and say, ‘So am I still annoying?’” Eventually she found out from shared pals that he’d been planning to ask her to be his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day but had chickened out. “Finally, he called me two days later, on the 16th, and asked me to be his girlfriend. I said, ‘Sure’—trying to play it off as if I didn’t really care, and the rest is history.”

Amber took that same tenacity and dynamic energy into wedding planning after Jason, a contracting specialist at the Department of Defense, proposed on a very belated anniversary trip to the Bahamas. Amber was as surprised as someone can be after 13 years together—especially after the hotel accidentally delivered Champagne to the room before the proposal. Still, Amber was thrilled when Jason slipped the ring—it had been her Bubbie’s—on her finger.

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They both knew they wanted to get married in Baltimore, since that’s where their love story started. “We also loved the idea of getting married on the water—the same waterfront we walk along day in and day out as residents—and the pier of the Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Museum sealed that deal for us,” says Jason. “We felt at home there and were stunned by the view of the city.” They even chose a clear top tent to keep the water views front and center the whole night.

When they were a little more than a month out from the wedding, Amber’s father passed away suddenly. To make matters worse, they also lost Jason’s grandmother and grandfather.

Their friends and family rallied around them as their wedding day approached, relieved to have an occasion to look forward to. “Everyone came together at our wedding to celebrate us and the beginning of a life we were about to create together after a few weeks of sadness,” she says.

As their attention shifted from grief to joy, Amber let herself worry about something frivolous—the wedding day weather. She woke up that morning greeted by overcast skies. “I was stressed about rain but the weather pulled through,” she says. “The sun poked out as soon as we entered the chuppah and I’ll never forget thinking that the three of them came together to bring us that light.”