Desert Hearts: Finding Love and Home in Palm Springs
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When Michael Ameel and Sam Steiber matched on the Hinge app, they didn’t need anyone to tell them it was the start of something special.
They had Palm Springs.
Ameel was just leaving the desert enclave after a trip there with friends, while Steiber was just arriving. During his stay, Steiber’s friends encouraged him to redo his dating app profile. He did, and the new images featured Palm Springs prominently. When Ameel saw those pictures, it was clear the two would have a connection.
“I remember, you know, Michael and I literally like messaging on the app as I was in the backseat of the car driving home from Palm Springs,” said Steiber. “A couple days later we were still talking and we were just very honest and you know, upfront about what we wanted in our relationship too.”
After a phone conversation, they went on their first date. The conversation was free-flowing and easy, and it was clear they were developing a bond, especially when it came to connecting over the mid-century modern retreat a couple hours east of L.A.
“I said to Sam, ‘I literally go to Palm Springs all the time,’” said Ameel. “It’s one of my favorite places to escape to.”
In addition to their shared love of the desert city, the pair discovered they had similar backgrounds. Ameel is the director of social media for Microsoft, and Steiber is a senior social media manager at the Peacock streaming service. Both grew up in the Midwest; Ameel is from just outside Milwaukee, while Steiber grew up in the suburbs of Detroit.
Both of them knew they wanted a life outside the Midwest. Ameel grew up a movie buff, obsessed with storytelling, getting his first job at 16 in a movie theater. Steiber thought he might be a filmmaker, having made movies with his friends as a kid. While Ameel knew from an early age he would head west to L.A., Steiber didn’t come to that realization until college. They both arrived in Los Angeles in the same year, 2015, and settled a few neighborhoods apart.
“We love the Midwest, but. LA really just gave us the space to grow and figure out who we were and to, I think, ultimately be our true gay selves,” said Ameel.
Over their two-year courtship, Ameel and Steiber grew closer, escaping to Palm Springs to celebrate birthdays, holidays and other special occasions. It was also where Ameel proposed – and where they had their wedding ceremony back in April.
“We knew Palm Springs was the only place it could be,” said Ameel. “It’s where our story began and a place that’s always made space for queer joy.”
While the couple were married in a civil ceremony in Beverly Hills a few months before, the April party in Palm Springs was an intimate affair, attended by 50 of their family members and close friends. The couple wrote their own vows – with Michael promising not to use Microsoft’s AI chatbot to craft them.Their mothers walked them down the aisle to “Pure Imagination.”
Central to the elegant affair was a long communal table, which they joke was “the most expensive dinner party, ever.”
Something else that mattered to them was having the vendors who brought their wedding to life be women - and LGBTQ+-owned businesses. It was also essential that the event felt distinctly theirs.
“Planning a wedding as a queer couple brought so many different layers of meaning,” said Ameel. “To us it was less about the heteronormative stereotypes or roles in a wedding. It was really navigating what tradition means when so many of the rituals were never designed with us in mind.”
The couple performed a first dance they had choreographed mere days before, and spent their honeymoon in Bora Bora, where they stayed at the Four Seasons.
Back home in L.A., they are settling into married life, which Steiber said is going well.
“ It’s nice to just kind of like be entering this new chapter of our lives and just kind of seeing where it goes from here.”
From a match made on Hinge to a shared love of Palm Springs to a day celebrating their love and feeling seen, Ameel and Steiber are grateful and happy for their love story.
“It was deeply poetic because we never imagined a world of this happening growing up in the Midwest,” said Ameel.
Vendor List:
- Planning: Jason Mitchell Kahn
- Photography: Danforth Neal
- Catering: Eight4Nine
- Music: DJ Modgirl
- Rentals: Signature Party Rentals
- Florist: Artisan
- Wedding Venue: The O’Donnell House
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