I am enormously grateful to Ian Lambeth for drawing our attention to the report of the nuptials of Def Leppard's Phil Collen that appeared in this Sunday's New York Times. The Times does features on particularly interesting weddings with that wicked mixture of precision and puzzlement that is the paper's hallmark and, as Ian point out, this particular occasion was "none more Tap". We urge you to read it either here or in its original form with photographs on the NYT site.

ON stage the hard-rocking guitarist is known as the short-haired shirtless one. But Phil Collen can also be a master of understatement.

On the eve of his marriage to Helen Simmons, Mr. Collen, who plays lead guitar for the British heavy metal band Def Leppard, described his pre-Helen love life as “complicated.”

Complicated as in his three children from his two marriages and other relationships, and all the hookups that go with life on the road.

“I was jaded,” said Mr. Collen, now 52. “I’d been around.”

Her story has fewer footnotes. “I was in a relationship,” said Ms. Simmons, a Brooklyn native. “I felt happy and complete. I was 40 and never married, but I thought it just wasn’t part of God’s plan for me.”

The couple met in 2008 in Reading, Pa., when Ms. Simmons, a costume designer, was training for a second career with I Love All Access, a Los Angeles company that offers V.I.P. concert tickets. He introduced himself as they passed in a hallway.

Ms. Simmons was not a follower of the band, which had begun branching out, doing collaborations with country stars. “I’m a Michael Jackson fan,” she said. “I didn’t know who he was until I saw him on stage that night.”

She wouldn’t see him again until the summer of 2009, when she was assigned to be her company’s liaison to the United States leg of Def Leppard’s “Sparkle Lounge” tour.

“A whole year later, he remembered me,” Ms. Simmons, now 42, said. “I told him I was going to be on the tour with them.”

They chatted easily. “I knew she was ‘the one’ within an hour of meeting her,” Mr. Collen said.

Ms. Simmons, too, felt a spark. “But emotionally, there were a lot of other things going on with us,” she said.

The other things included a wife from whom he was separated, a girlfriend from whom he wasn’t, and Ms. Simmons’s boyfriend.

Two days later, he asked her for seven minutes of her time.

Not 5 or 10? “I knew I needed more than 5 and I figured 10 would be too long,” Mr. Collen said matter-of-factly.

Mentally, he said, he went “on autopilot.”

“I needed to say what I had to say but in a way that she wouldn’t think I was a nut case. I said to her, ‘Look, I don’t know what your situation is, whether you’re married or have kids, but I know that you are the one who is meant for me.... Am I freaking you out?’ ”

Ms. Simmons “wasn’t looking for anybody,” she said, but listened quietly. “I didn’t say anything other than ‘no’ when he asked me if I was freaked out. When he said he’d wait for me whether it took one year or five years, I knew he was right.”

It took two weeks. His girlfriend and her boyfriend broke off their relationships for what Ms. Simmons described as “completely unrelated reasons.”

For their first date, during the band’s Cleveland stop, Ms. Simmons and Mr. Collen went bowling — chaperoned by band mates and several roadies — where, Ms. Simmons said, they “totally gravitated toward each other like magnets. Then we were in trouble.”

It was the sort of “trouble” that drew them ever closer.

Mr. Collen, a follower of Sant Mat, an Eastern philosophy, said his attraction to Ms. Simmons was instant and undeniable. “Sant Mat teaches that we are all connected by the same energy,” he said. “It was like we had known each other for years, but had to wait until that time to meet.” He added, “You don’t question what was meant to be.”

Their communication is effortless, Mr. Collen said. “I haven’t talked to anybody that easily since Steve.” He was referring to the Def Leppard guitarist Steve Clark, who died in 1991 from alcoholism and drug addiction and who had been Mr. Collen’s other half when they were known as the Terror Twins.

Ms. Simmons, too, finds something mystical in their match. “When I was younger, I imagined the kind of man I could love,” she said. “I couldn’t see his face or hear his voice, but I felt his essence.

“I’ve never been in love, but I always knew how it would feel,” she said. “And this is how it feels.”

As it turned out, the couple would soon have plenty of time and reasons to ponder one another and reassess their lives. Last August, while on tour in West Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Collen proposed to Ms. Simmons on the beach of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Manalapan, Fla. — a move that was quickly followed by Mr. Collen filing for divorce from his second wife. By the fall, Def Leppard’s 2009 tour had been abruptly canceled. (In the British press, Mr. Collen cited the band’s “mental and physical exhaustion” after five years of touring.)

Along the way, Ms. Simmons adopted many of Mr. Collen’s lifestyle choices. She has abandoned alcohol and become a vegetarian. “I believe a wife should be a true complement to her husband, that their lifestyles should be as close to each other’s as possible,” she said.

While his band is on hiatus, Mr. Collen performs with Man Raze, a side project described on its Web site as a clash of ’70s punk simplicity and ’80s pop-rock excess. He maintains his discipline on the road, Ms. Simmons said, which makes him less interested in the temptations that have destroyed many a rock marriage.

“To Phil, his body is a temple,” Ms. Simmons said. “He travels with his trainer,” working out three times daily, alternating cardio, weights and a martial art called muay Thai.

She added, “He’s outgrown all the other stuff — the women, the drugs. When one of the guys says, ‘Hey, let’s do this,’ he’ll say ‘No thanks, have your fill. I’ve already done that.’ ”

On July 16, overlooking the same beach where Mr. Collen proposed, the couple were married — blissfully oblivious to the suffocating Florida humidity.

The couple’s 60-plus guests were more mindful. Seated in the heat for a 6:30 p.m. wedding that didn’t start until nearly 7, several were focused on finding shade or wishing for a ceremony that matched the brevity of Mr. Collen’s initial pitch to Ms. Simmons.

Of particular concern was the well-being of the bride’s 90-year-old grandmother, Hattie Simmons, who waved away concerns and accepted a proffered paper fan.

And then the bride appeared in an Adele Wechsler gown of ivory-colored silk as her godmother, Debbie Blackwell Cook, sang “The Man I Love,” by George Gershwin.

After the ceremony — at which Eddie Rodriguez, of the Conversations With God spiritual center in Miami, officiated — the guests quickly filed indoors for a no-alcohol, no-animal-product wedding reception in keeping with the couple’s lifestyle.

Meanwhile, the ever-so-brief plea Mr. Collen once made to Ms. Simmons has inspired a new project. “My writing partner and I wrote a song called ‘Seven Minutes,’ with kind of a country flavor,” the bridegroom said. “We made the demo and we’re shopping it around.”

Now, what was your favourite bit?