Preeti Krishnan and Brantley Austin Hawkins were married Aug. 17 at Oheka Castle in Huntington, N.Y. Vimal Raval, a Hindu Priest, performed the ceremony.
The bride, 30, is the chief of staff at DailyPay, a company in New York that works directly with employers and payroll companies. She graduated from Georgetown and received a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
She is a daughter of Meena Krishnan and Shivram M. Krishnan of McLean, Va. The bride’s father is the chief executive of Koolrox, a services and contracting consultant in McLean. Her mother is the president and chief executive of Inoventures, a health care and technology resources software development company, also in McLean.
The groom, 31, is an associate specializing in investment management law at Davis Polk & Wardwell, the New York law firm. He graduated from the University of Connecticut and received a law degree from Cornell.
He is the son of Vivian J. Hawkins and Samuel P. Hawkins Jr. of Danbury, Conn. The groom’s mother is an associate accounting director at Epsilon, a marketing consultant in Wilton, Conn. His father retired as an insurance claims adjuster at AmTrust Financial, a financial services firm based in New York.
The couple met in May 2014 when Mr. Hawkins was an associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell, and Ms. Krishnan was a summer associate there.
Ms. Krishnan, who began working at the firm that same month — Mr. Hawkins had already been there a year — noticed Mr. Hawkins “holding court,” as she put, at a welcoming cocktail reception for new employees.
“I thought he was super cute,” she said. “I also remember thinking to myself, how can someone who is doing so well at a prestigious law firm look that kind and be so easygoing and casual around people — I was very intrigued by his persona.”
Mr. Hawkins was equally intrigued. “I noticed her moving in between different groups at the reception, she was this beam of light,” he said. “I could also hear her talking, she had a very distinctive voice, and a very distinctive laugh.”
Ms. Krishnan eventually worked her way over to Mr. Hawkins’s group and introduced herself.
“She was beautiful,” Mr. Hawkins said.
By the time their brief conversation ended, Ms. Krishnan and Mr. Hawkins — both living in Manhattan at the time — as well as four of their colleagues, made plans to go to dinner at a nearby restaurant the following week.
“I was very excited, probably more excited than Brantley about getting the chance to get to know him a little better,” Ms. Krishnan said. “As a summer associate, I was definitely going there to talk to Brantley to see if anything might happen between us before I went back to finish law school.”
She sat across from him and they took part in a conversation that lasted five hours.
“I found her to be very forward,” Mr. Hawkins said. “She was direct and extremely engaging.”
It wasn’t long before they realized something was there. “It was as if I had known him for a long time,” she said. “It was a super different feeling than anything I had experienced with any other man I had gone out with.”
Six months later, they were dating, and after a somewhat long-distance relationship between New York and Philadelphia, where Ms. Krishnan was finishing her law degree, Mr. Hawkins proposed in August 2018.
“Being with Brantley has been so transformative for me,” Ms. Krishnan said. “I never felt that I could really be myself until I met him, but we are on the same page in terms of our values and the way we figure out life.”
