The couple: Demi Friedson (née Zitelman), 37, grew up in North Potomac and graduated from Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville. She works as a director of sales enablement for Toast, a restaurant technology company. Andrew Friedson, 39, grew up in Potomac and graduated from Winston Churchill High School in Potomac. He represents District 1 as a member of the Montgomery County Council. They live in Bethesda.
How they met: Demi and Andrew connected online—either through JSwipe, a Jewish dating app, or Hinge; they can’t remember—in 2017. Later they discovered through resurfaced Facebook photos that they had attended several of the same parties over the years. “You see those scenes in a movie and you’re like, ‘That’s not real. That could never happen.’ … It turns out, it actually is real,” Andrew says. There was chemistry on their first date, at Uncle Julio’s in Bethesda, but Andrew was preoccupied with planning his first run for the county council. (He was elected in 2018, and again in 2022.) “The timing wasn’t right,” he says. Nevertheless, they kept in touch, and in 2021—after receiving COVID-19 vaccines—they decided to go out again, this time to Tiki on 18th in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Sparks flew again—in no small part because of all their shared roots. “Being from the same area and having so much overlap and just mutual connections, it was a sense of comfort and familiarity,” Demi says.
The proposal: Andrew popped the question outside the Louvre Museum in Paris on Aug. 4, 2023. “There is a beautiful corridor where we somehow were able to have literally nobody there,” Andrew says. Waiting for them was a violinist Andrew had enlisted to play two of the couple’s favorite songs—“Joy” by Andy Grammer as the pair was approaching and “You Are the Reason” by Calum Scott as he got down on one knee.
The venue: “I love the water, and so I had this idea of wanting to do [the wedding] on the water,” Demi says. A visit to the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, Maryland—a large resort that could accommodate their guest list and was available on their desired dates during Memorial Day weekend—sealed the deal.
The outfits: When it came to finding a dress, “I basically knew what style I was looking for,” Demi says. “I wanted it to be strapless. I wanted it to be kind of form-fitting to the waist, and then kind of go ball gown.” She picked out a Martina Liana creation, which featured floral details cascading down the skirt, from Betsy Robinson’s Bridal Collection in Baltimore. Demi had the dress altered to remove the straps and give it more of a plunging neckline. Andrew, meanwhile, paired a charcoal tuxedo with a pair of navy blue velvet loafers and a matching bow tie. He finished off the ensemble with his grandfather’s mezuzah cuff links (containing a scroll with text from the Torah), his other grandfather’s military ID bracelet, and a watch gifted to him from Demi on their wedding day.
The ceremony: The pair got married in front of about 300 guests on May 26, 2024, on the resort’s Manor Lawn, with a panorama of the Choptank River as the backdrop. The couple’s personal touches—they wrote their vows, and the officiant was Andrew’s longtime rabbi—made the ceremony “our favorite part of the wedding,” Demi says. In lieu of bridesmaids and groomsmen, the couple’s 10 young nieces and nephews walked down the aisle. “That allowed us to really center our families as part of the ceremony,” Andrew says. Demi and Andrew were escorted to a transparent chuppah, festooned with white hydrangeas, delphiniums and orchids, by their parents. After saying “I do,” the newlyweds walked back up the aisle to “Joy”—a callback to the proposal.
The reception: After an outdoor cocktail hour, the festivities migrated indoors to one of the resort’s ballrooms for what Andrew describes as a “party-forward” reception. “The event itself was very much no distractions, everybody just having a good time together,” he says. That approach carried over to the modern, understated decor. “I have a very simple style,” the bride says. A white-and-champagne color scheme inspired the tablescapes, where ivory-colored blooms mingled with pillar and taper candles in sleek glassware.
The food: For dinner, guests dug into pistachio-crusted salmon and a salad of romaine hearts, watermelon radishes, pepitas, heirloom cherry tomatoes and focaccia croutons. Afterward, a surprise awaited them for dessert. “Being local people is important to us, and so we wanted to have something that was local,” Andrew says. Instead of a formal wedding cake, they opted for Maryland’s official state dessert: several Smith Island cakes in chocolate, Funfetti, cookies and cream, and strawberry flavors. The signature cocktails—“his,” an old-fashioned, and “hers,” a skinny margarita—were joined by a joint “ours” option: an espresso martini.
The music: After Demi and Andrew had their first dance to “You Are the Reason”—the other song that was played for them at their Paris engagement—an 11-piece band named Free Spirit got guests onto the dance floor with a mix of modern and classic tunes. But its real feat was getting Demi onstage to sing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” “Everyone that knows me knows that that’s, like, the farthest thing from my comfort zone,” Demi says, but after Andrew got onstage and her loved ones encouraged her, “I just went for it.” And, of course, she had a superfan in Andrew, who says, “It was one of the greatest moments of my life.”
The after-party: Once the excitement of the reception died down, the newlyweds’ photographer, Michael Bennett Kress, suggested one last photo op, making full use of the resort’s amenities. “We changed into bathing suits and then jumped in the pool,” Demi says.
The honeymoon: The couple had scored an all-inclusive trip to Antigua at a silent auction for Bethesda’s Imagination Stage. So a few days after the wedding, they traveled to the tropical island in the Caribbean for a week of beach time. “It was [a] crazy stressful time for work, and then straight into the wedding,” Andrew says. “So having that time for just us to relax was great.”
Vendors: Band, Free Spirit; catering and venue, Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay; dress, Betsy Robinson’s Bridal Collection; florals, B Floral Event Design; hair, Caleigh Era Hairstylist; invitations, Creative Parties; makeup, Shenoa Nicole Makeup; photography, Michael Bennett Kress Photography; planning, Belle of the Ball Weddings and Events; videography, Rivion Wedding Films.
This appears in the May/June 2025 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
