Adriana Xhakli and Perry Petra-Wong were married Sept. 14 at the TWA Hotel at JFK in Jamaica, Queens. Richard Desroche, a friend of the groom’s mother who was ordained through the American Marriage Ministries, officiated.
Ms. Xhakli, 31, who goes by Adri, is a property manager for her family’s mixed-used buildings in the Bronx. She graduated from N.Y.U. She is the daughter of Shpresa Xhakli and Rexh Xhakli of Cliffside Park, N.J.
Mr. Petra-Wong, 30, is a data scientist at Apple Media Products in Culver City, Calif. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the son of Christina F. Petra of South Bristol, Me., and Kenneth Wong of Manhattan.
In July 2012 Ms. Xhakli got an earful about Mr. Petra-Wong from her high school friend, Nick Boscamp. When he mentioned that Mr. Petra-Wong, his college friend, would be flying to New York from Los Angeles for a visit, she took for granted he would pick him up at the airport and offered the use of her SUV for what she thought would be later that week.
Mr. Boscamp said his friend was about to land at Newark airport, as they spoke. She persuaded him to take her keys and drive them there pronto in her S.U.V. “I had two glasses of wine and was up for the adventure,” she said.
Mr. Boscamp texted Mr. Petra-Wong as they left the restaurant, and soon they pulled up to a curb at the airport where he was waiting with a suitcase.
“That guy’s cute,’’ Ms. Xhakli, recalled thinking, and Mr. Petra-Wong, who was in the back seat said he was “definitely curious about her, too.”
They hung out everyday during his stay over the next couple of weeks. Mr. Petra-Wong, who was staying in Chelsea with his mother, just quit his job and planned to move to New York in a couple of months.
“My friends were busy, his friends were busy,’’ said Ms. Xhakl, who just returned after a year and a half in Argentina, and was also not working that summer.
They had dinner at the Wythe hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where she said she embarrassingly “housed a cheeseburger,’’ leading to a rocky start.
“She ate it so fast, I assumed she didn’t like me,’’ he said, especially when she said she felt sick and they had to leave. But, during his two-week stay, they also went to Fort Tilden to watch the sunrise in Queens, ate pancakes in the West Village and went for a night swim at Rockaway Beach.
“It was kind of a magical time,’’ Mr. Petra-Wong said. They bonded as friends, and after he left New York texted and talked constantly.
In September, when he came back to stay, he took a cab straight to her apartment from the airport, after first having picked up her favorite breakfast, a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich. They also had their first kiss.
“He’s the funniest guy I ever met in my life,” she said. “His way of putting thoughts together cracks me up. He has a hilarious, contagious laugh. That’s what I fell in love with.”
By October, she told him she was in love with him, and then cut his apartment search short by suggesting he move into the loft she was sharing with two other guys on Canal Street in Manhattan.
“She was totally unafraid,’’ he said, explaining it was drilled into him to take things slower. “I was along for the ride. It all happened so fast.”
In 2018 they decided to become “mutually engaged’’ during a long weekend in Bodrum, Turkey, where at 5 a.m. one morning they hiked through the woods to a pier. “We had a long conversation about our relationship,’’ she said. “We watched the sun rise in silence. It was a very us way of getting engaged.”
Their wedding at the TWA Hotel at the airport, a salute to where they first met, also follows suit. “It’s wacky in a way that felt fun,’’ he said.
“You can see people waiting for cabs on the other side of the glass,’’ she said. “That’s the charm of it.”
They will soon fly out of Kennedy Airport to Los Angeles — he on Monday, and she the following week — to start their new chapter together.
