When Julie Wang and Marc Gottlieb met for the first time, in July 2017, after connecting through the dating app OkCupid, things didn’t go so well.

“She was not very impressed with me,” he said. “She felt I had a persona on, and she was right.”

She said: “I was very excited to meet him. I remember my heart fluttering — this sounds so cheesy — when I was walking to our first date.”

But the palpitations didn’t last long. “I see him and I am just so disappointed,” she said. “He was so eager and excited that my initial reaction was, ‘Oh my God, no.’”

He texted her the next day, and she replied with a monosyllable, wanting to put him off. But just a few days later, when she was stuck in the airport on her way home from Toronto, he remembered that it was her birthday and texted her. When she told him where she was, he dropped everything to entertain her.