Yuchen Feng and Theodore Russell Sumers noticed each other in 2012 when he arranged an indoor rock-climbing outing when each was a summer intern at Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund in Westport, Conn.
“I was very into rock climbing,” said Mr. Sumers, 30, who goes by Ted, and is pursuing a doctorate at Princeton in computer science focusing on computational cognitive science. He graduated cum laude from Dartmouth.
A week later at a beach party in Fairfield, Conn., they drifted away from the crowd and walked along the water talking about the meaning of work and humanitarian engineering. (He worked on a hydropower project in remote villages of Rwanda in 2011.) And they had their first kiss.
That summer they went indoor rock climbing at the local gym, swam at his parent’s house in Montrose, N.Y., and played the word game Boggle.
“All the feelings were there but neither of us were sure of what we would do after the summer,’’ said Ms. Feng, 29, who is taking the groom’s name. She graduated from M.I.T. and is now based in Princeton, N.J., as the lead of a health care technology innovation team at LiveRamp, a San Francisco technology company.
They parted ways before heading back to college — she for her senior year, he to finish a five-year engineering program. They kept in touch, sometimes with funny texts, and in the fall he was her guide in Rumney, N.H., her first time rock climbing outdoors.
“When she couldn’t do something I was impressed by how consistently positive she was,” Mr. Sumers said. “She was a great adventure partner.”
In the summer of 2013, he moved to San Francisco to work at a tech start-up company, and she got a job at a hedge fund in Boston. They dated other people. Two years later, when Ms. Feng moved to San Francisco, they caught up as friends, and by the end of the year decided to give dating another shot.
That winter she was on more equal footing with him rock climbing as they exchanged climbing leads hundreds of feet up on vertical sandstone cliffs in Red Rock Canyon in Las Vegas.
“This time I’m not the ingénue,’’ she said. “I had done a lot of outdoor climbing. We were partners.”
In 2019 they moved in together, and Mr. Sumers proposed March 14, 2019 at their apartment in San Francisco.
“I would like our anniversary engagement to be on Pi Day,” she recalled him saying, and agreed it was a good excuse to have pie each year. After he was accepted to Princeton’s doctoral program in 2019 they decided to move back East.
Before the coronavirus outbreak, they had planned a wedding brunch July 4 with 100 guests in the groom’s parent’s backyard in Montrose. Instead they have been sheltering in place there; Ms. Feng has bonded with his mother, Dr. Anne Ricks Sumers, over tennis and teaching her how to cook Chinese dishes.
On July 3, they were married under a tree outside the Princeton Chapel by Dr. Elliott Sumers, the groom’s father, who became a Universal Life minister for the occasion. Attending along with his parents were her mother Xiaochun Fan and father Shi Feng, and a friend from the groom’s doctoral program.
“It was intimate, sweet and short,” said Ms. Feng, who fondly recalled during high school her mother would joke as they walked around the Princeton campus, a short ride from their house in Highland Park, N.J., that one day Ms. Feng would go there and get married at its chapel.
“It’s heartwarming to see my mom’s dream of a Princeton wedding come true in an unexpected way,’’ she said.
