While most couples have a first date, followed at some point by a first kiss, Jess Seok and Gifford Brooks did not. But they didn’t skip the kissing part.
Both were analysts for an economics and financial consultancy — she in its San Francisco office and he in Washington — when they met in May 2014.
She was spending a week working in Washington, and caught his eye right away, so he made sure to approach her when the analysts all met for their regular happy hour at the end of the week.
“I thought she was lovely and very funny, really warm and goofy, and had a disarming personality,” he said. “And it just so happened that I was coincidentally planning to transfer to San Francisco.”
At the end of the night, after talking about San Francisco, their shared interest in the outdoors, in the climate and the technology industry, two shared a first kiss, Ms. Seok said. “But that was about it.”
“I was excited that he was moving out, but we weren’t a couple,” she said.
In July, he arrived in San Francisco, and soon the two were hiking and biking and perpetually sharing a breakfast burrito together somewhere. They were also finding much to admire in each other.
“I think I liked him since the day I met him,” said Ms. Seok, 31, who is now a product manager at Twilio, a cloud communications platform in San Francisco.
“When she finds something very funny, she throws her head back and has this laugh that exudes from all of her self,” said Mr. Brooks, 30, now the analytics manager at Tally, a financial technology company in San Francisco that helps people manage credit-card debt. “It’s just impossible to not share in her good humor and her laughter when that happens.”
By January, Mr. Brooks said, “These outings felt more like dates. They no longer just felt friendly. They felt like more than that.”
Ms. Seok remembers the moment when their relationship took a romantic turn. “There was one Saturday where we were going to spend an afternoon together, going on a hike at the Presidio, but ended up spending the whole day together,” she said. “Dinner, then a movie — ‘Mad Max 2’ — and at the end of the night, he asked if I could be his girlfriend. We had a second kiss then.”
In 2016, he was accepted into the M.B.A. program at Northwestern, and the couple broke up. “We weren’t ready for long distance,” she said.
But before he could leave for grad school, he tore an anterior cruciate ligament while playing soccer, and found himself bedridden after surgery. He deferred business school for a year, and Ms. Seok took time off from work to help him mend.
“She made my convalescence much more positive that it otherwise would have been,” he said.
So the two reunited, and the following year, when he headed off to Chicago, she left for Philadelphia, to begin studying for an M.B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania. A few months before they each graduated, they were engaged.
On June 7, on a deck overlooking San Francisco Bay in Sausalito, Calif., they married. Albert L. Hong, a lifelong friend of the groom, officiated, having become a Universal Life minister for the event.
The couple had intended to have a big wedding in Seoul, where the bride’s family resides, but with the coronavirus pandemic and uncertainty about restrictions that might affect her temporary work visa, they opted not to wait for another time.
“We felt like it would be a small act of victory against this virus,” Ms. Seok said.
