Jamie Antoinette Cooke and Dr. Joshua Ryan Zeiger figured they had been to at least 20 of the same social events while at Georgetown, starting with a welcome party in their freshman year.
“We knew each other from afar,” said Dr. Zeiger, 31, who was reintroduced to her in June 2014, two years after they graduated, he magna cum laude.
Ms. Cooke, also 31, said she had “pestered” a mutual college friend to set her up.
“He immediately thought of Josh,” she said, who had asked about her.
They soon joined their friend and a few others at a club with a D.J. in New York’s Meatpacking District. They hit it off, and danced the night away. Later, they all trooped over to a nearby bar.
“We had a first kiss at the bar,” said Ms. Cooke, and then another right before she got into a cab home to the West Village.
The next weekend just the two of them met at Wilfie & Nell, a West Village pub, where he recalled her wearing a “cool” outfit — a leather jacket over jeans and heels.
“I don’t think too much about what I wear,” said Dr. Zeiger, who wore shorts, sneakers and a polo. He lived in the East Village, and worked at a research lab that summer before his second year at N.Y.U., from which he received a medical degree.
Ms. Cooke, on the other hand, had a keen fashion sense. She was a junior account executive then at 3.1 Phillip Lim, and is now a sales director at Tibi, both women’s apparel companies in New York.
“He was kind of preppy with colors mismatched,” she said.
His outfit quickly took a back seat to their conversation, including their passion for musical theater growing up, he in New York and she in London from ages 10 to 18. (Her parents still live there). They often unwind at home these days with their karaoke machine, particularly belting out songs from the “Hamilton” soundtrack.
“I then left for Paris Fashion Week,” she said, but after she returned, they had “really amazing dates” at Pearl & Ash, a restaurant on the Bowery, and watching the film “The Royal Tenenbaums” in Central Park.
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
A weekend trip by the end of the summer to his parents’ house in East Hampton solidified things.
“The next time, can I introduce you as my girlfriend?” he asked on their drive back to the city, and without skipping a beat she replied, “Yes, of course.”
They adjusted to his rigorous clinical rotations and her quarterly trips to Paris to present collections. After she gave him a set of keys early on, he often left yellow roses, her favorites, on the kitchen table to greet her after a trip.
“My love language is small gestures,” she said. In the summer of 2017 they moved into an apartment two floors below hers.
In March 2018, on what’s known within the medical school community as Match Day, he got into the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, where he is now a fourth-year resident in otolaryngology — head and neck surgery.
In April 2020, he dropped her off at her mother’s Spring Lake, N.J., home for a few weeks, so that she could get away from him (he worked with Covid patients) and the city. He proposed that same day.
“I missed what you said,” she recalled telling him, stunned after he got down on one knee on a wooden bridge overlooking the lake. “Could you propose again?”
He did, 20 minutes later.
The year before the wedding brought them each bouts with Covid, but after their quarantines, in October 2020, they decided to move to the Upper West Side, with more space and Dr. Zeiger’s parents a couple blocks away.
On Sept. 18, they married at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, N.Y. Rabbi Hanniel Levenson officiated outside the museum at sunset, before 110 vaccinated guests, under a huppah with antique hydrangeas, baby’s breath and yarrow.
Extra assurance came from a 70-foot-long art installation on the museum’s south-facing facade. In neon letters it said: “EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT.”
