Marcellus Hall was walking through the lobby of the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel in April 2010 when he heard the laughter of Lisa Nichols.

“It sounded so light, like she was really enjoying herself,” said Mr. Hall, 53, a Bahamian sportscaster who was staying at the hotel in Kingston, Jamaica, while covering a regional track meet.

Ms. Nichols, 55, was there on business, too: A motivational speaker and author who has appeared as a relationship expert on shows like “Dr. Phil” and “Steve Harvey,” she was leading a weeklong corporate training event organized by her company, Motivating the Masses in Carlsbad, Calif., which offers personal and professional development programs.

Though Mr. Hall wanted to know more about the stranger with the captivating laugh, shyness compelled him to just keep moving at first. But as he waited for the elevator up to his room, he reconsidered.

“I had this great conversation with her in my head,” he said. “I thought, ‘Man, I wish I had had that conversation for real.’”

He gathered his courage, turned around and walked up to Ms. Nichols, who was still laughing with her assistant.

Small talk led to a sit-down on the lobby couches. The two started their conversation at 9:45 p.m. Eleven hours later, they were still there. As Mr. Hall put it, they spoke about “everything but work.”

At 8:45 the following morning, 15 minutes before Ms. Nichols had to leave for her flight home to San Diego, they said goodbye. Mr. Hall left with her phone number. Ms. Nichols left unsure why he had asked for it.

While Mr. Hall had apprehensions about starting a conversation with her, Ms. Nichols, who by then had shared her story of triumph over poverty, discrimination and single motherhood with millions, had certain insecurities that made her uninterested in pursuing him.

The mother of a then-teenage son, Jelani, who is now 27, Ms. Nichols had never been married. She hadn’t entirely ruled out the possibility of a relationship, but her heart had been broken more than once in the past. At the time, she was also “100 pounds overweight,” she said.

Mr. Hall, on the other hand, seemed like a perfect specimen. From the time he graduated from Castleton University in Vermont in 1994, he had worked as a broadcaster in his native Bahamas, where he is currently an anchor at Cable Bahamas in Nassau. He had also been a bodybuilder.

“He was this tall, deliciously dark and handsome man,” Ms. Nichols said. “And I was 224 pounds.”

“The moment I left him, I began to tell myself, ‘He’s not real,’” she added.

Down a self-preserving rabbit hole she went. Though Mr. Hall had told her when they met that he had a son from a previous marriage, which ended in divorce in 2009, and was expecting a child from another relationship, which had also since ended, Ms. Nichols concocted a likelier scenario.

“He didn’t have two children, he had nine, and seven of them were unclaimed,” she recalled telling herself. “He was not single, he was married and had a girlfriend and wanted me to be his second girlfriend.”

“I made it up,” said Ms. Nichols. “It was something I told myself to feel good about letting this man go.”

Once she was back in California, Mr. Hall’s texts started rolling in.

“Every once in a while, I would reach out,” Mr. Hall said. Like Ms. Nichols, when he became a parent, he put dating on the back burner and prioritized raising his children Brandon and Marcia, now 17 and 11. But “I knew she was somebody I wanted to be a part of my life,” he said.

Ms. Nichols, sticking to the narrative she invented, usually ignored him. Nevertheless, he persisted. “About once a month,” she said, “he would just say, ‘Hi, how you doing, how’s Jelani?’”

One such text arrived at a breaking point of sorts for Ms. Nichols, in July 2018. “My life was going great,” she said, except for one problem: “I was tired of helping people have great love relationships and not having one myself.”

At home, in the shower, she prayed. “I cried out to God, please give me a man that’s consistent. I don’t care about his income or his origin. I just want a man of his word.” The same night, her phone pinged with a text from Mr. Hall.

She started scrolling through their messages. “I realized this man had been saying hi to me nearly every month for eight years,” she said. That was consistency. At 3 a.m. West Coast time and 6 a.m. Bahamas time, she took a chance.

“I called Marcellus Hall,” Ms. Nichols said. “He hadn’t heard my voice in eight years. But I called him.”

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In that early morning conversation, she asked if he was single. When he said he was, she believed him. Then she asked if he would like to date her.

“My knees were knocking and my teeth were chattering like a middle-school girl’s,” she said. But she got the response she wanted.

“Yes, I would like that very much,” Mr. Hall recalled telling her.

Aiming for them to have an in-person reunion without too much pressure, in case sparks failed to fly, Ms. Nichols organized a weeklong motivational conference in October 2018 in Nassau, the Bahamas, where he lived.

Before she arrived, Ms. Nichols, who had lost 93 pounds in 2016, texted him a picture. “I was really proud that there was less of me to love,” she said.

Mr. Hall recalled responding, “That’s really nice, I’m glad you had this personal journey where you lost the weight. But I was fine with you at 220.”

His response “blew my mind,” Ms. Nichols said.

When she arrived in Nassau, the two fell in love fast. Mr. Hall also gained a better understanding of Ms. Nichols’s mass influence: After years of knowing simply that her job involved inspiring people, as she’d explained it back in 2010, he encountered her legions of followers on Facebook, where he saw hundreds had left comments on a workout video that he had helped her make for the conference she came to lead.

“I realized, OK, she’s famous,” Mr. Hall said. But he wasn’t intimidated. “I knew the type of person she was,” he said. “I never got the sense that she would change personalities.”

Following the Nassau trip, Ms. Nichols and Mr. Hall settled into a short period of dating long-distance, during which they would visit one another. After each met the other’s children, she was ready to give up San Diego for the Bahamas. She arrived in January 2020.

The house she moved into in Nassau, where the two quarantined together at the beginning of the pandemic, soon became their permanent home, and Mr. Hall became convinced of what he had already suspected: He wanted to marry Ms. Nichols.

On Sept. 2, 2020, the day after his birthday, he proposed on a beach walk. “I said, ‘As a man gets a year older, he gets a year wiser,’” he said. “Proposing to her was my gift to myself.”

For years Ms. Nichols had been telling herself she might never get married. “The chatter in society was so loud about that, I got lost in it,” she said. “But at that moment, I knew I had my own timeline to get engaged. Yours might be 26 or 35 or 60. Mine was 53.”

On March 11 at Casa al Mare, a rented mansion in Nassau, they were wed before 90 in-person guests and 500 more who watched via live stream.

The Rev. Dr. Alex Ellis, a friend of the couple and a pastor of Abundant Life Family Worship Church in New Brunswick, N.J., who holds a Ph.D. in ministry from New Brunswick Theological Seminary, led the ceremony and the Rev. Delton Ellis, a pastor of Mount Tabor Church in Nassau, solemnized their marriage.

Ms. Nichols wore a bejeweled burgundy strapless gown with a sweetheart neckline. After seeing a photo of a similar dress years earlier, she reached out to Bahamian designer David Rolle of House of Raphelita about making one. “It spoke to me,” she said.

She was escorted to an oceanside altar by her son and her brother, James Nichols Jr. Awaiting her there was Mr. Hall, in a cream-colored suit.

Before being pronounced married, they read handwritten vows.

“You are the culmination of all my best choices and my best decisions,” Ms. Nichols told Mr. Hall.

To her, he said, “I will be the string to your kite, to keep you from flying away as you soar.”

On This Day

When March 11, 2022

Where Casa al Mare in Nassau, the Bahamas

The Guests Wore White Instead of wearing white herself, Ms. Nichols asked all her guests to do so to represent the purity of their love.

Gospel Break In the middle of the ceremony, the couple paused to sing and dance to one of their favorite gospel songs, “I Smile” by Kirk Franklin.

Party After Party In addition to a reception that followed the ceremony, guests were invited to a welcome party featuring karaoke, an island-wide scavenger hunt and a soul food brunch.

Charreah Jackson contributed reporting.