Caroline Anderson and Robert Parisot can point to the day they almost met in 2011. They were both students at Harvard Law School at the time, and Ms. Anderson, who was in her third year, was participating in Harvard Law School’s Ames Moot Court Competition, a competition for appellate brief writing and advocacy. Mr. Parisot, who was a first-year law student, had been assigned to attend as part of his classes.
“It would have been this great meeting, because I was arguing in front of Justice Sonia Sotomayor and our team won,” said Ms. Anderson, 34, who goes by Carly. But Mr. Parisot, 31, skipped the competition to study, and they both graduated without ever having crossed paths.
Instead, the couple met in Washington in June 2017, on the dating app the League. They had their first date at a bar and immediately hit it off.
“I quickly learned that Carly was not only beautiful, but also brilliant and magnetic and one of the funniest people I’ve ever met,” Mr. Parisot said. “By our second date, when she walked into that bar, I thought she was way out of my league.”
In November, Ms. Anderson invited Mr. Parisot to meet her family for the first time at their large Thanksgiving celebration in Highland Park, Ill. Mr. Parisot was so committed to making a good first impression, he memorized a 55-person family tree ahead of time.
When Mr. Parisot visited his family a few weeks later, his sisters teased him about how often he referenced Ms. Anderson.
“I was obviously smitten by that point,” Mr. Parisot said.
In January 2019, the couple moved to Chicago for work and to be closer to Ms. Anderson’s family. Ms. Anderson is the senior counsel for competition and global governance at Boeing in Chicago, and Mr. Parisot is a corporate associate at DLA Piper, a multinational law firm in Chicago.
In April 2019, Mr. Parisot took Ms. Anderson to a lily pond in Lincoln Park in Chicago, where he asked her to marry him. It wasn’t just a beautiful location — it was the same park where Ms. Anderson’s grandfather had asked her grandmother to marry him almost eight decades earlier. The thoughtfulness of Mr. Parisot’s proposal was not lost on Ms. Anderson.
“It signified that Rob really understands what’s important to me,” Ms. Anderson said. “It really drove home to me how thoughtful he is, and that’s been true our entire relationship.”
The couple were planning to get married at the Drake Hotel in Chicago on March 28, with about 265 guests. Because of the coronavirus, they had to reschedule their wedding plans, and were married Aug. 1 at the Exmoor Country Club in Highland Park, with Rabbi Rachel Weiss officiating. The couple had a second ceremony for the groom’s family on Aug. 8 at La Bella Vista, a wedding venue in Waterbury, Conn. Even with the change of plans, Ms. Anderson and Mr. Parisot are excited about entering a new chapter of their lives.
“He’s the kindest man I know,” Ms. Anderson said about Mr. Parisot. “I think he’s super smart and thoughtful and engaging, and I think he’s going to be an incredible father if we’re lucky enough to have kids.”
“It’s been some of the most difficult times personally for me because of external circumstances,” Mr. Parisot said, “but Carly has also made it the best few years of my life.”