I knew it,” Steven Frost says of meeting his husband CJay Tauber for the first time. “I knew it right away. It was one of those moments where you see somebody, and you don’t know why but you know you’re gonna spend the rest of your life with him.”
Frost had decided to spend his birthday in 2015 at Quench Lounge in Largo, where local favorite Tauber still bartends. “He came in and I was going back to officiate my niece’s wedding in Wisconsin,” Tauber recalls with a laugh. “So I left, but he couldn’t wait to come back and get my number.”
The two quickly became friends, and Tauber recalls that the two “talked and talked and talked,” leading to their first official date at Quench’s employee Christmas party. “We were pretty much inseparable ever since then. We kind of clicked automatically and then he met my family a few months later.”
It was in those early months that Frost asked Tauber’s mother if he could marry his now-husband, though it would be years before the official engagement or ceremony. She approved. “I would say I’ve always wanted to get married, to find somebody that I could want to walk around and be with for the rest of my life,” Tauber says warmly. “It took until I found him to say yes, I found somebody.”
It wasn’t until Tauber that Frost could say he’d always sought marriage. “I just love him and I just want to share my life and things that I’ve accumulated with him. We’ve got an age difference here; he’s 42 and I’m 59… the longer we’re together the more I’m headstrong to live to 100 so I can see him at 80.”
Following their official engagement, Tauber says wedding planning began immediately. “It happened in a month, five weeks,” he says. “We got engaged and we started planning the wedding.” The duo leaned on family for help, something Tauber says his step-mother was insistent upon.
The duo tried to keep their ceremony small, beginning with 25 guests but nearly doubling that at Dunedin’s waterfront Bon Appétit Restaurant. “It just kept growing and growing,” Frost says. “We had great appetizers, lobster, filet mignon, great dessert and an open bar. Nobody had to worry about anything. The venue was just beautiful because it was all-glass all the way around.”
Rose petals ran along the aisle and adorned each table, they recall, with bow tie napkin-holders and homemade candy finishing out their theme. “We wanted to keep it manly,” Frost quips, with Tauber warmly recalling their “masculine wedding.”
“Marriage doesn’t feel any different because I always have loved him and I don’t know if I could love him more,” Tauber says. “I’m happy that we’re able to move forward in our life and now we get our future. I look forward to every day that I wake up and get to see what new adventure we’re gonna go on.”
“It’s a day to day thing,” he says. “I absolutely love it.”
