The gazebo isn’t much to look at, but it’s big enough to hold the 20 or so people milling about inside, their names hovering over their heads. Sasquatch. Pug. Raban. Their chatter dies down when the organ pipes up, its familiar B-flat chord announcing Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus.” A few hundred feet away, near a large building off in the distance, a handful of small white blurs begin to appear, vanish, and then reappear a little closer to the gazebo, blinking their way along the bridal path.

The first to come forward is a young woman, her shoulder-length brown hair curling up at the ends. She’s wearing a peach-­colored blouse and a white skirt. No shoes, though. No legs either. Here in Rec Room, a popular virtual-reality platform, users are represented by avatars that don’t have all their parts. If you want to sing “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” you’ll get only about halfway through. So here come Ice Soul’s head, torso, and hands, floating along together, one leap at a time. With each leap, a dotted line projects outward from her midsection to represent where the avatar will land in digital space. (Locomotion in virtual reality isn’t all that great yet. If you’re at home with your headset on and game controllers in your hands, you can navigate around Rec Room by using your real-life legs, but your head is still physically tethered to your computer. So if you need to cover more than a few feet, the best solution is to “teleport”—hold down a trigger on your hand controller, point that arced dotted line toward where you want to land, and let go.)

After Ice Soul come the other members of the wedding party. There’s J2, in a top hat and tuxedo jacket. There’s Glitter, her red hair up in two buns, wearing a pink and purple ensemble. The trickle of bridesmaids and groomsmen thickens to a stream: Hobobob, Unlistedgamer, Princess Fuzzy, MrElmo, Mia, Noble Archer Gib. Everyone in suits or women’s separates.

Finally, here comes the bride. Priscilla. Purple flowers in her hair, a pale-yellow belted dress on, holding a bouquet of flowers. She teleports into the gazebo and stands next to Mark, in his tuxedo and top hat. He’s abandoned his usual Rec Room handle—Th!nk!—solemnifying the occasion by using his real-life first name.

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April 2018. Subscribe to WIRED. Nik Mirus

This isn’t the first time people have started a relationship because of VR; this isn’t even the first time people have been married there. (That was in 1994, when a San Francisco couple got married at CyberMind, a VR arcade where the bride worked.) But this may be the first time a couple has met in VR, become close in VR, and then tied the knot in VR, nurturing along their relationship from hello to matrimony with only a nominal amount of real-life contact.

Priscilla Wadsworth is 28. A successful sports artist, she creates incredibly detailed pencil drawings of University of Alabama football players and sells them over the internet to diehard Crimson Tide fans. She’s also, in her own words, a “hermit.” She grew up in a tiny town in Alabama and now lives in Birmingham, where for the past five years she has worked from home without venturing out much. “I just go to the post office,” she says, half-­joking, when describing her nonvirtual social life. “As far as, like, having actual people that I talk to almost every day? No.”

One day in 2016, flush from the sale of a couple of big drawings, she decided to splurge on an Oculus Rift headset at Best Buy. And Rec Room, a free app that she could download and open from her headset, became one of the first games she tried. But at first, Priscilla’s new pastime didn’t go well at all.