“I was making the biggest mistake if I didn’t try now,” he recalled thinking.
Weeks later, when Dr. Yee took a trip to New York to visit family in December, Mr. Ma met her in the city, where he confessed his feelings for her. In January 2019, he asked her to be his girlfriend. By February, she had agreed.
That April, Mr. Ma left the Navy and, in October 2019, moved in with his father in Los Angeles. He currently works remotely as a customer success engineer at Sysdig, a cybersecurity company in San Francisco. Dr. Yee works at Adventure Dental in Santa Clarita, Calif., and as an attending pediatric dentist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
Living in the same city, she said, meant that they “could finally do really normal things like see each other after work or watch Netflix together.”
The two became engaged in June 2021, during a trip to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. As they rode horses along a trail with what Mr. Ma described as a “beautiful overlook of the ravine of the canyon,” he proposed. “My heart was full,” Dr. Yee said.
On April 29, they held a wedding ceremony at Ole Hanson Beach Club in San Clemente, Calif., with 124 guests, all of whom were asked to show proof of vaccination or to take Covid tests before attending. It was led by Ahmad Woods, a friend of the groom, who signed their marriage license April 30 after being ordained a Universal Life Church minister.
Watching the bride approach the altar, Mr. Ma said, was a moment that will always be “very, very clear in my mind.”
