Ten years after Rev. Sun Myung Moon presided over a 1982 mass wedding in Madison Square Garden, New York Times reporter Melinda Henneberger caught up with some of the 4,000 strangers who were consciously coupled. The article’s opening:

“When Jonathan and Debby Gullery were married 10 years ago, in a mass wedding of 2,075 couples at Madison Square Garden, they were widely viewed as bit players in a bizarre show produced by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Strangers screamed at them as they sold flowers on the street, and Mrs. Gullery’s father said he thought seriously about having her kidnapped and brought home.

But over the last decade, the Gullerys say, both they and their church have grown up and settled down. On a recent evening, amid the chaos of bedtime for their three young children, they took turns coaxing the 4-year-old back to her room while Mrs. Gullery’s father, who was visiting from Vermont, took refuge in the novel he was reading in the living room of their suburban home.

Mr. Gullery now owns his own graphic arts business, and the couple’s oldest child, who is 7, attends the local public school. Their youngest is 2. To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they took the children to Burger King.

‘Things change in 10 years,’ Mrs. Gullery said. ‘Our church has changed, we’ve changed, our family has changed. With our neighbors, we didn’t put a sign out and say, ‘Here we are, we’re the neighborhood Moonies,’ but they all have kids and after they got to know us, it was O.K. The last couple of years have been fairly low key.’

Their lives are nonetheless quite different from their neighbors’. They remain completely dedicated to the Unification Church, rising early each morning for family prayer, and offering up all their daily tasks to the service of God and Mr. Moon, who is for them the second Messiah.”