Reeba Susamma Monachan and Keshav Sethi Attrey were married Oct. 6 at Belk Chapel on the campus of Queens University in Charlotte, N.C. Dr. Janice Odom, who was ordained by the Alliance of Baptists at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, N.C., performed the ceremony, with the Rev. Father George Philipose, vicar of the Christian Orthodox Church, taking part. Earlier in the day, the couple took part in a Sikh ceremony at the Gurdwara Sahib Charlotte in North Carolina. Gyani Satnam Singh Ji, a Sikh priest and a friend of the couple, performed the ceremony.
The bride, who is 34 and will take her husband’s name, works in Redwood City, Calif., as the director of diversity, equity and inclusion at Summit Public Schools, a charter management network across California and Washington State. She is also a board member for EsengO, a nonprofit organization based in Montreal that supports people with mental health issues.
She is the daughter of Soosamma M. Monachan and Monachan M. Varghese of Charlotte. The bride’s father retired as a vice president and senior legal officer at Bank of America in Charlotte. Her mother retired as an Ayurvedic doctor in Kerala, India.
The groom, who is 40 and works in East Palo Alto, Calif., is a software development engineer at Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com that provides an on-demand cloud computing platform.
He is the son of Jaspal S. Attrey and Dr. Roshan L. Attrey, also of Charlotte. The groom’s parents are both retired professors. His mother was a professor of electrical engineering technology at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte. His father was a professor of English and dean of liberal arts at Livingstone College in Salisbury, N.C.
The couple first made contact in December 2016 in Washington, where Ms. Monachan was working for the Department of Education, and Mr. Attrey, then living and working on the West Coast, was visiting the mother of a close friend who was hospitalized there.
On a Friday, Mr. Attrey went on the dating website OkCupid and connected with Ms. Monachan. “She was a very beautiful Indian girl,” he said.
Ms. Monachan was also impressed. “I thought, wow, he’s really attractive,” she said.
She loved his line about travel. “Many people travel to see the sights,” he wrote. “For me, the adventure lies in the people I meet, the stories they share, and the completely unexpected adventures that happen while I’m there.”
They arranged for a Sunday get-together over coffee at a bake shop in Arlington, Va., where Mr. Attrey found Ms. Monachan photographing the macaroons for Snapchat.
In between sips of coffee, they learned that while they were both of Indian descent, his parents were from New Delhi and Himachal, in north India, and were Sikh and Hindu, while her family was from Kerala, in south India, and were Christian.
They also discovered that they had both grown up in Charlotte, about 30 minutes apart, and had many mutual friends.
They realized they were at the same Festival of India celebration in Charlotte in 2007. Mr. Attrey was on stage playing a tabla (an Indian percussion instrument), while Ms. Attrey was in the crowd cheering on the dancers, one of whom was a cousin.
“We found out that we ran in many of the same social circles,” Ms. Monachan said. “Even though Keshav is a bit older than me, it’s incredible that we never met.”
They fell in love before their coffee got cold, and soon embarked on a long-distance relationship that got considerably shorter when Ms. Monachan moved to take a job in San Carlos, Calif., in September 2017.
“He was smart, very friendly and very family-oriented,” Ms. Monachan said. “I never imagined I could find someone as extroverted as I am, someone who shares my sense of humor and loves people as much as I do.”
Six months later, they got engaged. “Keshav has brought a ton of joy to my life,” Ms. Monachan said. “He has helped minimize my flaws and maximize my strengths, and that’s how I knew he was right for me.”
