By the time Alex Song said his first hello to Kelly Jean Qu in September 2017, she was saying goodbye to New York, where she had lived for nearly three years, and on the verge of moving back to her native Los Angeles.
“I had already packed up most of my furniture and I was sleeping on a mattress with no bed frame,” said Ms. Qu, 34, who met Mr. Song through mutual friends in Manhattan, and soon went out on a first date with him.
“I remember talking to her and thinking, ‘Whoa, this girl is beautiful, and she’s super smart,’ and she really brings a lot of emotional maturity into every situation,” said Mr. Song, 33, the head of capital markets at Ramp, a financial technology start-up company in New York.
“It wasn’t long before I realized that she is not afraid to speak her mind on just about any topic, and that she has the ability to dish out and take criticism in a balanced way,” he added. “The thought of her leaving was not a very happy one.”
Ms. Qu was feeling much the same way about Mr. Song, who graduated from Stanford and received an M.B.A. from Harvard.
The way they tell it, they simply blew each other’s minds.
“Both of us fell in love with each other’s intellectual curiosity and boundless energy for learning,” said Ms. Qu, 34, the senior director for corporate development at Kind Snacks, a food company based in New York, where she focuses on mergers and acquisitions.
“I dated a lot of people with intellectual horse power,” said Ms. Qu, who graduated from Brown and received an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.
“But as far as intellect goes, Alex is in a league of his own,” she added. “No one I have ever met is as genuinely, intellectually curious as he is, and no one has more mental energy.”
She laughingly recalled making a mistake once by telling Mr. Song that she loved astrology as much as he did.
“He was actually insulted,” Ms. Qu said, laughing some more. “He made it quite clear that while astrology is complete nonsense, astronomy is a serious science.”
Ms. Qu decided to stay — “It was really a leap of faith,” she said — and the couple got engaged in November 2019.
Their wedding ceremony was Aug. 8 at Wayfarers Chapel in Palos Verdes, Calif., where the bride’s parents married 35 years earlier. It was led by the Rev. David C. Brown, an ordained minister of the Swedenborgian Church, and attended by 32 guests, including a small wedding party as well as the couple’s grandparents and parents, Melissa Qu and Steve Qu of Laguna Woods, Calif., and Amy Zhou and William Song of St. Louis.
“I’m someone who has always enjoyed nerding out,” the bride said in the company of the groom on the morning of her wedding.
“In Alex,” she said, laughing again, “I found the nerd I have been searching for my entire life.”