Shannon Renee Kahlden and Christopher Roger Westerlind were married Dec. 27 at Sweetwater Country Club in Sugar Land, Texas. Crawford Mayfield, a Universal Life minister, officiated, incorporating Christian traditions. On July 18, the couple is to have a religious ceremony at Karlstad Cathedral in Karlstad, Sweden.
Ms. Kahlden, 26, is a law clerk at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York, and is in the process of being admitted to the bar. She graduated with highest honors from the University of Texas and received a law degree from Columbia.
She is the daughter of Pamela S. Kahlden of Vermilion, Ohio, and Richard M. Kahlden of Richmond, Texas. The bride’s father retired as the owner of RK Mechanical, a commercial refrigeration and air-conditioning business in Wallis, Texas. Her mother is a resident associate at Meister Road Group Home, an intermediate-care facility for individuals with intellectual disabilities in Lorain, Ohio, affiliated with Murray Ridge Center Loraine County Board of Developmental Disabilities.
Mr. Westerlind, 27, is a vice president and the United States head of credit in New York at the Options Group, a financial services recruiting and strategic consulting firm in New York. He graduated from Texas A&M University.
He is the son of Annika Westerlind and Roger Westerlind of Sugar Land. The groom’s mother, a stay-at-home parent, until 1988 was a hairstylist and a partner in Modefrisoren, a hair salon and spa in Göteborg, Sweden. His father works as an oil and gas consultant in Houston.
The couple met in July 2011 when a mutual friend invited Ms. Kahlden to a party at Mr. Westerlind’s parents’ house in Sugar Land when she was a senior in high school and he was entering college. They began dating five years later when she started looking into law schools in New York, where he lived at the time. Mr. Westerland proposed in August 2019, and the couple decided to keep the engagement short because Ms. Kahlden’s father has Alzheimer’s disease. “It is very important to me that my father can walk me down the aisle and enjoy the celebration,” she said. “I have always been daddy’s little girl.”
