Adrianna Kruyt, a Canadian in the first year of graduate studies in Manhattan at the New School, didn’t have plans for Thanksgiving in 2016. So her parents arranged for her to spend the long weekend celebrating the American holiday with friends in Bedford Hills, N.Y.
Isaac Wasserman had also received an invitation to spend the weekend at the home where Ms. Kruyt would be staying. He was then a medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and intended to spend the weekend studying.
The younger visitors ended up staying up late together.
Ms. Kruyt, who is now 29 and an account manager in Manhattan for Antidote Technologies, a British digital health company, was up so that she might find a happy medium between her own time zone and that of her younger sister, who was in Hong Kong.
“That’s when I was really hooked, “ said Dr. Wasserman, 28. “This woman seemed different from all the other women I had met.”
At the weekend’s conclusion, the two took the train together back to Manhattan. The trip left both intrigued. “There were definite sparks,” said Ms. Kruyt.
Back home, they chatted on Facebook and within the week, he took the subway to Brooklyn, where she lived, from his place in Manhattan. They were to meet at Roberta’s, a storied pizza place, but the line was so long that they ended up having drinks across the way as they waited. They finally had dinner around 10, then went dancing. Afterward, he walked her home and they shared their first kiss.
On their next date, in Central Park, he told her that he would be courtly. “I didn’t want her to think I was only interested in her for kissing reasons,” he said.
“So I was like, ‘Oh. Maybe we’re just friends,’” she said.
But after their third date, she realized she was not in the friend zone. “That’s when I knew this was a real thing,” she said.
The couple’s relationship proceeded in an orderly manner until 2018, when he was accepted into a surgery program that would take him out of medical school for a year and fling him halfway across the globe, to India. The two talked. “It was going through that decision process together, navigating that process together, that made me realize, ‘This truly is more than just a girlfriend. This is how you approach problems and decisions,” he said.
After he returned in April 2019, he proposed with a sapphire that he had gotten in Sri Lanka and had it placed into a ring that he designed and had made in India. He decorated their apartment with the pictures, emails and text messages of their courtship suspended from twine.
“I really freaked out, started hyperventilating — not in a good way,” Ms. Kruyt said. “I went to go be sick in the bathroom.”
He said he understood and went to bed. “I knew that intellectually she was there, and needed the time emotionally,” he said.
“He was totally gracious and kind about it,” said Ms. Kruyt. “I was up all night crying, telling myself, ‘Did I just ruin this?’”
The next morning he woke to find that she’d turned over all of his proposal graphics and written “Yes” on each.
“But he looked at me and said, ‘I don’t want this to be a pity yes. I want you to ask me,’” she said.
Both soon left on trips, but she schemed to intercept him at his return at a rental-car office near the airport in Newark, N.J., and enlisted the rental-car crew to delay him until she could arrive. She showed up and proposed to him with a ring made from the twine he’d used to hang up the pictures in his own proposal.
On April 28, the couple married in Westmount, Quebec. The bride’s father, Peter Kruyt, who had been designated an officiant in the province several years ago for another marriage, presided at the bride’s family’s home.