Nearly four years ago, Lily Snyder (left) had agreed to be introduced to Marcela Sapone by a mutual friend who was sure they would hit it off.
When three months had passed and Ms. Sapone had still not reached out, their mutual friend inquired about the delay.
“I’m pretty focused on building a company from scratch,” said Ms. Sapone, who is now the co-founder and chief executive of Hello Alfred, a Manhattan-based technology firm that connects consumers to household services.
Their mutual friend, who went to the University of Pennsylvania with Ms. Snyder, 36, and to Harvard with Ms. Sapone, 34, would not relent. He enlisted the help of several mutual friends from Harvard to help give Ms. Sapone a gentle nudge in the direction of Ms. Snyder, who until January was a vice president at Sotheby’s Auction House in New York, and now advises art collectors on purchases and sales.
“I guess it took a team effort,” said Ms. Snyder, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and received a master’s degree in modern and contemporary art and design from Christie’s Education, London.
They met on a Wednesday at a restaurant in New York, which turned into a six-hour conversation spread over two bottles of wine. Comparing notes, they soon realized that each had gone to high school overseas during the same five-year period, from 1997 to 2002.
“During our high school years, Marcela lived in Denmark and Paris and I lived in Israel, due to our dads’ jobs,” Ms. Snyder said. “So we shared this sort of weird, alternate high school experience, this parallel upbringing with MTV Europe, and we experienced different music and styles than kids in the U.S. were experiencing at that time.”
Ms. Sapone began feeling as if she were not in Ms. Snyder’s league. “When I first saw her, my first reaction was like, ‘Wow, this woman’s beautiful,’” said Ms. Sapone, a trustee scholar of Boston University, from which she graduated summa cum laude before attending Harvard, where she received an M.B.A. with distinction.
“She was so cool and was someone with unbounded energy who could go out every night of the week and still be up in time for work every morning,” Ms. Sapone said. “I truly felt like I was in the company of someone who was well out of my reach.”
But Ms. Snyder felt differently, and told Ms. Sapone as much. “Marcela brought a seriousness to our relationship that gave it a sense of grounding,” she said. “She was also someone who really, truly cared about me. She was a keeper.”
The couple were married Sept. 14 at the town clerk’s office in Pound Ridge, N.Y., with the town clerk, Erin Trostle, officiating. Six guests attended They originally intended to marry May 2 at the University Club in Manhattan, with 250 guests, but the coronavirus changed forced them to change their plans.
Among the guests were both sets of parents: Daphne Cecelia Beckford, a lifelong educator, and Martin Sapone, a senior vice president in the specialty chemical industry, of Wheaton, Ill., and Tina Davis Snyder, an artist and graphic designer, and James Snyder, the executive director of the Jerusalem Foundation and the director emeritus of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. They live in Pound Ridge.
Ms. Sapone wore the same lace wedding dress and matching veil that her mother had worn on her wedding day 40 years earlier.
