When Chelsea Connor first saw Will Carey, all 6 feet 7 inches of him, in June 2014, he was onstage at the comedy club Caroline’s on Broadway, discussing the gentrification of the chopped cheese sandwich.
“I’m a Brooklyn girl and I’ve been eating that chopped cheese sandwich since I was a kid, so I could instantly relate,” said Ms. Connor, 31, the director of media relations and communications for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, a New York-based labor union and division of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.
“He did a lot of observational humor and had so many funny bits that just got to me,” she said.
Mr. Carey, 34, whose height helped him notice Ms. Connor sitting with friends on a crowded evening, was a lot more observational than she first thought. When his standup routine ended, he walked off the stage and made a beeline for her and introduced himself.
“I just saw her and thought she was very beautiful,” he said. “When I started talking to her, I thought she was particularly smart and interesting, and I wanted to know more about her.”
He asked if he could escort her to the subway station, and Ms. Connor, then living with her parents in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, accepted his offer. “She gave me her phone number and then told me I could call her in a month,” said Mr. Carey, then living in Woodside, Queens.
Ms. Connor had been a spokeswoman for the campaign of Adriano Espaillat, who was running against Rep. Charles Rangel in a Democratic primary in New York. She explained to Mr. Carey that she was too busy to do anything that month but focus on the election.
“I knew nothing about local politics at the time,” Mr. Carey said, “so I was trying to follow the debates on local newscasts and various websites. When I saw that her candidate had lost, I texted her to say I was sorry about that.”
Ms. Connor remembered Mr. Carey’s text as “the very first I received the morning after the campaign.”
“It’s 7 in the morning and I look at my phone and it says, ‘Will the comedian,’ which is how I had saved his name,” said Ms. Connor, who graduated from N.Y.U. and received a master’s degree in elections and campaign management from Fordham.
“It took me a few seconds to remember who he was,” she said.
They were soon back in touch, and Ms. Connor set up a first date at a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan with Mr. Carey, who now works in content operations at Stitcher Radio, a podcasting network in New York. He is still a stand-up comedian, as well as a producer and host of the podcast “Between Awesome and Disaster.”
“I had only spoken to her in person that one time at Carolines, but I had a better conversation with her than I had ever had with any other woman,” said Mr. Carey, who graduated from Towson University.
“There was a certain, driven stick-to-itiveness about her that had obviously come from working in the world of politics,” he said, “and I found that very attractive.”
They began dating steadily. In October 2018, they took a trip to Southeast Asia. On a rainy day, they climbed Elephant Mountain in Taipei, Taiwan, and after arriving at the summit cliff, Mr. Carey proposed, as fellow climbers around them began to cheer.
They were married Sept. 9 in an outdoor ceremony at Gantry State Park in Long Island City, Queens, before five guests, including their officiant, Samuel Zelitch, who became a minister of American Marriage Ministries for the event. The couple had originally planned to marry May 23 at the Brooklyn Cider House with 178 guests, but the coronavirus forced them to cancel.
