After getting engaged in January on the California coast and enjoying some time as a newly-engaged couple, we planned a trip to visit east coast wedding venues in mid-March...just when San Francisco issued its shelter-in-place order. After a few months filled with hope and horror, we made the difficult decision to split our wedding in two: a socially-distant family-only ceremony in October 2020, and a larger event in when it's safe to have the big celebration that we've been dreaming about since we met nearly seven years ago. While our October wedding was magical, we really missed the opportunity to collect our favorite family and friends in one place. We are so excited that we will finally have the chance to do that soon. While Covid refuses to let us go "back to normal", we're confident that with more than two years of experience, we will be able to safely gather, enjoy a meal, and dance the night away. We are so looking forward to it!

In 2014, we were both living in DC, looking for love on OkCupid (it was 2014, okay?) when Divya messaged Sam. For Sam's first OkCupid date - Divya's second - we decided to meet at a cocktail bar called The Passenger. Twenty minutes after the date was set to began, Divya arrived and, after almost sitting at a table with a different guy, we finally met. Despite the late start, the date lasted for more than three hours. Though the first date was long, we expected our relationship to be short - Sam was applying to business school, and Divya was looking for new jobs outside of DC. As fate would have it, we landed only a two-hour Metro North ride away (Sam at Yale, Divya in Manhattan) and we were having too much fun to cut the relationship short. We spent the first two years together dreaming about Sam's graduation, when we could end our "medium distance" relationship. That, however, would not be challenging enough for this budding power couple. Instead, after an epic cross-country road trip to move Sam to SF, Divya started business school at Harvard and we both became professional red-eyers and JetBlue frequent flyers. Finally, in 2018, Divya moved to San Francisco and we got our first apartment together in the Mission. Since then, we've loved exploring the West, joining our communities from various walks of life, and trying to find Divya a suitable New York slice. In January 2020, Sam popped the question during an unexpectedly rainy weekend getaway among the redwoods on the Northern California coast. We've spent our engagement recovering from ACL surgery, viewing concerts from the handicap section, enduring a global pandemic, getting away in Joshua Tree, and moving into a new house and planting grass to moderate success...all of which feels pretty typical given the journey it's taken to get here. We've had a long time to fall in love, and couldn't be happier to make it official!