Betsy Zeidman and David Kleeman were a year apart at Sidwell Friends School in Washington in the 1970s, though both were on the school newspaper and so knew each other casually. Their awareness of each other over the ensuing decades was limited to occasional Sidwell alumni updates.
“I certainly was not tracking him,” said Ms. Zeidman, 61.
But in the fall of 2014, Mr. Kleeman, 63, made a plea to other Sidwell students of his era to show up at an alumni event in the Williamsburgh section of Brooklyn.
“I didn’t want to be the only old person there,” he said.
Ms. Zeidman, who also then lived in New York, remembers that the two spent the event chatting in a corner, and both enjoyed it so thoroughly that they ended the evening with a pledge to get together soon.
A couple of months went by before “soon” came to pass, but, again, the two found they had a rapport.
“Our conversation was so easy and comfortable and wide-ranging and deep,” said Mr. Kleeman, who is now the senior vice president for global trends at Dubit, a research and strategy consultancy for digital development and production of youth-oriented games and apps; he works from a home office in Chevy Chase, Md.
Ms. Zeidman, who has a daughter she adopted as a single parent, remembers that she checked her telephone for messages from her daughter’s sitter at one point during the date. “I was stunned to find out that we had been talking for three hours,” said Ms. Zeidman, who is now a fellow for fair finance at the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University in Washington.
They went out again, and then, on New Year’s Day, the two almost had a first kiss. “It was one of those picture-perfect New York Christmastime snows,” Ms. Zeidman said. “I leaned in to give him a kiss, and he pulled away.”
Mr. Kleeman, who was a widower, remembers the moment a little differently. “She thinks I pulled away,” he said. “I remember us having a kiss then, but it may have been brief.”
In either event, the two soon settled matters between them.
“Every time we got together, it was a long dinner,” Mr. Kleeman said. “I think we closed down a couple of restaurants. And it was during that time that I realized, ’This is someone I want to be with.’”
In 2016, Ms. Zeidman moved to Washington to be closer to her family. Mr. Kleeman followed a year later, moving in with Ms. Zeidman and her daughter.
And it was then that Mr. Kleeman began to think about marrying again. “I wanted to take care of her,” he said, “and I wanted to take care of her for the rest of her life.”
On July 25, in a party of 13 in the backyard of her father’s house in Washington, Ms. Zeidman and Mr. Kleeman were married in a self-uniting ceremony, as allowed by District of Columbia statute. Bryan Garman, the head of Sidwell Friends School, led the ceremony.
Ms. Zeidman had been reluctant to proceed with the wedding after the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, but realized that postponing offered no greater certainty.
“Because when were we putting it off to? Who the hell knows what’s going to happen a year from now?” she said. “But I wasn’t happy about doing it without friends there — it didn’t feel right.”
In the end, with 100 or so people watching the wedding on video and sending congratulations and messages of thanks to the couple for providing something happy during the pandemic, she changed her mind.
“It felt like it was going to be less than, and I turned out to be completely wrong,” she said. “It was absolutely perfect.”
