The first time Henry Chapman asked out Melinda Becker, an acquaintance at Yale, where both were members of the imprecise and non-marching Yale Precision Marching Band, she was not entirely convinced he was being up front with her.
“He says he was looking for a drinking buddy,” said Ms. Becker, 27. “I claim that was him looking for a date, but not wanting to be rejected.”
Afterward, she told a friend, “I think I went on a date, but I’m not sure.”
They had drinks again, after, he says, she was “a little flirty on the bus” on a band trip back from a Harvard-Yale game. She played the clarinet and was by then the band’s manager; he played percussion.
“I’m pretty clueless when it comes to this kind of thing,” said Mr. Chapman, also 27.
At a band party not long afterward, in December 2014, they shared a first kiss. After the winter break, they went to a formal together, and finally agreed that they were officially dating.
She graduated a year before he did, but had already planned to stay in New Haven, Conn., for a job running clinical trials on Alzheimer’s disease at Yale. They had their first road trip together, shortly after her graduation, when he was on his way to New Mexico, to spend the summer leading Boy Scouts on backpacking trips.
“I realized that I could spend six days in a car with him, 24/7, and he didn’t annoy me,” Ms. Becker said.
“Melinda is one of the only people in the world I’ve been with that I never get bored of,” Mr. Chapman said.
After he graduated the following year, in 2016, he took a job in New York, and the two continued to see each other. But in 2017, with each approaching the end of a pre-professional job, they saw the opportunity to take a once-in-a-lifetime break together: They decided to spend a year living out of a vehicle, traveling the United States and hiking.
“It was something I always wanted to do, but I wanted to do it with someone,” Mr. Chapman said. “And we kind of had to do it because we hadn’t planned anything else to happen in our lives.”
“Once we decided to do that and started making plans, I’m planning a year of my life with him and could see that being forever,” she said.
The two got into a Ford Fusion and commenced a six-month tour that took them to 35 states. For the second six months of their trip, they hiked 1,200 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail.
By then, they had already started to talk about marriage.
For Mr. Chapman, though, the decision to move to Kansas City, in Ms. Becker’s home state of Kansas, was even more profound. She is now a first-year medical student at the University of Kansas medical school and he is an analyst and a data analyst for the Jackson County prosecutor in Kansas City, Mo., as well as a student in the online master’s program in computing and information technology at the University of Pennsylvania.
“This really felt like it was moving to Mars, honestly,” said Mr. Chapman, who grew up just outside of New York. “Doing that with her signaled to me internally a really big commitment, even bigger of a commitment than getting married.”
On Aug. 11, in the Wyandotte County Court House in Kansas City, Kan., the couple wed, too. Judge Jane Sieve Wilson, a district court judge, officiated, with two witnesses present. The couple also had a ceremony at the bride’s family farm, in Lenora, Kan., on Aug. 8, at which seven people joined them, plus a few more on a Zoom video link.
A college professor once advised Mr. Chapman that he should marry someone 50 percent smarter than he is himself, and, with Ms. Becker, he’s also found a partner who marches to a drumbeat that would make the couple’s Yale band proud.
“I want her to be on my team,” he said.
