But Mr. Duncan “began driving back and forth between Vermont and New Jersey, usually weekly, in order spend time with me,” she said. He got to know her family, including her late father, Kenneth Cooley, and her stepmother, Foy Cooley.

Ms. Cooley and Mr. Duncan were in New York together, attended juggling conventions, like an early one in Austin, Tex., where she remembers being awe-struck by a roomful of 100 jugglers riding on unicycles or balancing on 10-foot balls. They also traveled to far-flung places like Cambodia and the Costa Rican jungle.

Mr. Duncan started dropping hints about getting married. But Ms. Cooley, used to being single, wasn’t sure. Living together seemed a safer next step, so in 2017, they moved together to Saugerties, N.Y., about halfway between New Jersey and Vermont.

“We were getting to the point where we wanted to spend as much time together as possible,” Ms. Cooley said. But even in Saugerties, they were constantly on the road. Mr. Duncan was commuting to Vermont for work, and Ms. Cooley was regularly visiting her father, who was ill, in New Jersey. When he died in May 2018, she felt less tethered geographically and open to substantial life changes. (Ms. Cooley’s mother, Martha Curtis Cooley, is also deceased.)

She decided she had been a web designer long enough. “I had been doing that work for 20 years, and I wanted to turn a new page in my life,” she said. She left a job at Merck & Company and started consulting while exploring new career paths and relocating.