When Megha Jain said that Gopal Narsimhamurthy is “completely unlike any man I have ever met,” she was speaking about the man whom she met in June 2018. He was the man who took 15 round-trip flights — from Dublin, where he lived at the time, to New York, where she lived — during a 14-month period of long-distance dating.
Ms. Jain, a lawyer who works in employee relations at Disney in New York, was speaking about the man who so strongly believed that he and she were meant to be that he bought the apartment next to hers in Manhattan’s Sutton Place neighborhood for the purpose of knocking down the walls, combining them and starting a family.
“He was with me so often,” said Ms. Jain, beginning to laugh, “that people I knew were wondering if he actually had a job in Ireland.”
Ms. Jain and Mr. Narsimhamurthy, both 30, met at a bar in New Orleans, just after they had attended a bachelor and bachelorette party. Mutual friends had introduced them.
“She was the only person I noticed in a really crowded room,” said Mr. Narsimhamurthy, a senior director of funds at Kroll Bond Rating Agency, a financial services company in New York.
“She was wearing a red tank top, but it was her eyes I noticed first,” he said. “There was just something about them, and she was just so beautiful.”
They were soon enjoying what he called “a very natural conversation, nothing overly flirtatious.”
He learned that her parents, Neerja and Sanjay Jain, lived in Old Brookville, N.Y., but that she lived in Manhattan. He raised her eyebrows by telling her that he lived and worked in Dublin.
“Oh please,” she recalled saying. “Is that what you tell all the girls you try and pick up at bars?”
He eventually convinced her that he was telling the truth, and she convinced him that she was well worth what would amount to a very long-distance relationship. (They shortened the distance considerably in August 2019, when Mr. Narsimhamurthy moved back to New York.)
“We both think about life in the same way,” he said. “When I met her family, it felt as if they were my family.”
Ms. Jain felt much the same around his family. “I love his parents,” she said, referring to Geetha and Bala Narsimhamurthy of Kendall Park, N.J.
As for Mr. Narsimhamurthy, who proposed Dec. 7, 2019, Ms. Jain said, “I could tell early on that this was the kind of loving, caring and unselfish person that I could marry one day.”
They were married Aug. 29 at the home of the bride’s parents. V. Bhairava Murthy, a Hindu priest, led the ceremony before 50 guests. The couple had originally intended to marry at Oheka Castle in Huntington, N.Y., with 350 guests, but the coronavirus forced them to change plans.
“In terms of being the perfect partner,” the bride said, “Gopal has set the bar higher than I could have ever imagined possible.”