Joseph Anthony Caneco waited a week to respond to Layne Clark Hilton when she messaged him on Tinder in May 2020 — not because he was playing games, but because he was in a semi-crisis. He had to keep bringing Beanhead, his beloved cat, back to the emergency room. “I had my hands full,” he said.

Mr. Caneco and Beanhead, who lived in Downtown Brooklyn, had only each other for company while New York City — and most of the world — was on lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. Once Beanhead was on his feet again, Mr. Caneco messaged Ms. Hilton back. He wasn’t deterred when he learned that Ms. Hilton had “bamboozled him a bit,” as she put it, into thinking she was local when she was actually over 1,000 miles away in New Orleans.

“I thought, that’s not a big deal for me right now,” he said. “Let’s see where this is going.”

Ms. Hilton and Mr. Caneco are both 40. She is the lead products liability attorney at the New Orleans office of Meyer Wilson, a law firm. He specializes in bankruptcy cases as an associate at the law firm Fishman Haygood. For Ms. Hilton, his location was a more compelling reason to strike up a conversation than their shared professional background.

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“In New Orleans, you see everyone you know constantly,” she said, so eligible strangers seemed in short supply. “My love life was pathetic. I thought, New Orleans is a Covid hot zone and New York is a Covid hot zone. Why not just see what’s going on up there?” Zoom dates were becoming the norm anyway. And she found that swiping on Tinder from afar emboldened her. “I was a little more assertive on the app,” she said. “I was sending a lot of weird first messages to people.”

Once Mr. Caneco responded, he displayed what she considered a weirdness of his own: After only a few messages, he asked to switch to phone calls. “I’m somebody who only talks on the phone for work,” she said. Overcoming that aversion for Mr. Caneco seemed worth it, though. His devotion to Beanhead, whose mystery illness was never diagnosed before his death at the end of 2020, was part of it. So were his messages, which rung sincere. “There was nothing off-putting about him,” she said, including his background.

Born on Staten Island, Mr. Caneco joined the Navy in 2005 after earning a bachelor’s degree in history and Middle East studies from Fordham University. He was a naval flight officer until 2013, completing two combat deployments, and then served as a reservist until 2016 while he was in law school at Seton Hall University. He received a Master of Laws degree in taxation from Georgetown. Ms. Hilton happened to be a passionate follower of air travel stories. “I do have a morbid fascination with commercial aviation disasters,” she said. “But I was obsessed with tracking planes in general.”

A week or two after their first phone call, they migrated to video chats and the miles between them became meaningless. On weekends, they would share their screens and watch movies together, including the filmed version of the musical “Hamilton.” By August 2020, she was ready to take a leap of faith. “I decided I need to break out, Covid be damned, and go to New York City to meet him,” she said. She didn’t tell her family. “I think I told one colleague, ‘If I go missing, please avenge my death,’” she added.

Instead of falling off the face of the earth, she fell in love. After a first date on Aug. 28, 2020, at Chama Mama, a restaurant in Chelsea, they went back to her hotel and hung out on the balcony, tracking flights on her phone app. Love took wing for both that night. “I remember thinking, there were no differences, no issues in person,” Mr. Caneco said. “I wanted to move the ball forward.”

In September, he visited her in New Orleans for the first time. Coronavirus restrictions were looser there, and Ms. Hilton, who was born in the city, knew her way around. “I took Joe to a neighborhood sports bar,” said Ms. Hilton, who received a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., and her law degree from Emory University. “His eyes lit up.”

She went to see him for New Year, and by then they were a committed couple batting around hopes about one day living in the same city. It took a while. Mr. Caneco began the process of moving to New Orleans in the summer of 2022 while he was still working in New York. A year later, once he had passed the Louisiana bar exam, he had fully moved into Ms. Hilton’s home and was her fiancé.

On Jan. 13, Ms. Hilton and Mr. Caneco were married at Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic Church in New Orleans by the Rev. Mark Thibodeaux, pastor of Holy Name of Jesus Parish. At the altar, “we whispered to each other, ‘Oh my gosh, we did it,’” Ms. Hilton said. “Everyone was staring at us. But we only saw each other.”