Qian Julie Wang and Marc Ari Gottlieb are to be married Sept. 1. Rabbi Jeffrey J. Sirkman is to officiate at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Judge Morgan B. Christen, who serves on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and has her chambers in Anchorage, and for whom the bride was a law clerk in 2014-15, will take part in the ceremony, leading the couple through their vows.
Ms. Wang, 32, is known as Julie. She is a commercial litigation associate in the New York office of Robins Kaplan, a law firm. She graduated from Swarthmore and received a law degree from Yale.
The bride is the daughter of Crane He Chen and Weishan Wang of Jersey City. Her mother is a residential real estate agent at Living New Jersey Realty in Lyndhurst, N.J. Her father is an immigration lawyer in private practice in Manhattan, and focuses on asylum work for Chinese immigrants.
Mr. Gottlieb, 33, is a founder, with his brother, of Gottlieb & Gottlieb a law firm in Brooklyn; he specializes in special-education law. He graduated from Vassar and received a law degree from Yeshiva University.
He is a son of Barbara Gottlieb and Jay Gottlieb of Larchmont, N.Y. The groom’s mother is a neuropsychologist in private practice in Larchmont, and is a professor of education at the City University of New York’s Lehman College in the Bronx. His father is a professor of special education at N.Y.U.’s Steinhardt School of Education.
When Ms. Wang and Mr. Gottlieb met for the first time, in July 2017, after connecting through the dating app OkCupid, things didn’t go so well.
“She was not very impressed with me,” he said. “She felt I had a persona on, and she was right.”
She said: “I was very excited to meet him. I remember my heart fluttering — this sounds so cheesy — when I was walking to our first date.”
But the palpitations didn’t last long. “I see him and I am just so disappointed,” she said. “He was so eager and excited that my initial reaction was, ‘Oh my God, no.’”
He texted her the next day, and she replied with a monosyllable, wanting to put him off. But just a few days later, when she was stuck in the airport on her way home from Toronto, he remembered that it was her birthday and texted her. When she told him where she was, he dropped everything to entertain her.
“For six hours, he kept texting me and sending YouTube videos and cat GIFs,” she said.
He said, “So she decided to give me a second chance.”
That chance came the very next day, and their “real quick coffee” turned into a seven-hour date through Lower Manhattan. She showed him where she’d gone to elementary school and the Chinatown sweatshops where she had once worked.
“It was just kind of a magical, magical date,” she said. “He is just so openhearted, he puts everything out there. I know that that’s ironic because that’s what initially put me off, but that’s who he is.”
From that point, their romance progressed rapidly. By the fifth date, they said “I love you” to each other. Within a few months, he began asking daily if she would marry him someday.
By December, she and her two little rescue dogs, Salty and Peppers, had moved in with him.
A little over a year ago, while they were eating takeout and watching television, he said that he thought to himself, “I want this to be the rest of my life.”
So, he said, “I asked her to marry me. And then I said: ‘This is a secret proposal. I have to get the diamond ring and do things properly.’”
A month or so later, the two of them and the dogs walked over to his office to pick something up, and he snapped a Polaroid picture of her with the dogs in her lap. As he watched it develop, he suddenly felt as if he were looking at the picture 40 years after it had been taken.
“I’m, like, crying and I get down on one knee and I ask her to marry me again,” he said.
Once again, he swore Ms. Wang to secrecy about the proposal.
“I was like: ‘Really? Seriously?’” she said. “The next day, he saw his mom, and he was so excited, and so he told her.”
And with the secret out, the proposal that Mr. Gottlieb envisioned fell by the wayside. Not that Ms. Wang has any regrets.
“Not two days go by that he doesn’t look at me with tears in his eyes because he’s so excited about our life together,” she said. “And it was really romantic every time he proposed.”
