Ms. Gottfried replied, “I’ll take it.’’ She blushed as she read the note on the card saying how adorable she was.

“At the moment of peak embarrassment I was able to escape the train at Broadway-Lafayette,’’ he said, and winked at Ms. Gottfried as he got off.

She did a Google search on him as soon as she got to the office, and said later at a “dignified hour” she emailed him. “You might be surprised to learn that you are not the first guy to give me his card on the M.T.A.,’’ she said. “But you are probably the one who made me smile the most.”

After a week of flirty emails, she wrote: “I love emailing, but when are you going to ask me out.” A couple of days later they met at the Crown Inn bar, near her new apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

“A minute into our first date there was an instant sense of familiarity,’’ he said, and when he slipped away to the bar the song “My Girl” played over the speakers. “I sang it to myself, then I looked up and she was singing it, and then we smiled and bopping our heads sang it to each other.’’

They began dating, and two years later moved in together.

In December 2018, he carried out a proposal starting with a trip to an Andy Warhol exhibit at the Whitney Museum, where, as a ploy, he persuaded Ms. Gottfried, not a football fan, to join him and a friend at a Brooklyn bar for the Georgia-Alabama game. (And, where friends and family would also be there to celebrate.)