Iris and Mark originally met almost 8 years ago shortly after Mark had landed in Beijing. She was his manager at a private tutoring school, and he was the annoying teacher constantly pestering her for a raise. From an antagonistic beginning however, a real friendship formed based around a mutual love of complaining about their jobs. Short smoke breaks in the stairwell (they've both since quit) turned to longer conversations about life and living in the city and studying each-others languages. Although they would leave these positions, they would keep in occasional contact until they started working together more closely a few years later. It was then the romance began to develop, and their relationship blossomed. Three years later on their spring festival snowboarding trip, Mark asked Iris if she'd marry him, and Iris, despite normally being a very intelligent woman, agreed. Now, they'll be getting married in October in Beijing and are incredibly out of their element planning a wedding, but they expect everyone will still have a good time even if the napkins don't match the flowers.