Ms. Krishnan eventually worked her way over to Mr. Hawkins’s group and introduced herself.

“She was beautiful,” Mr. Hawkins said.

By the time their brief conversation ended, Ms. Krishnan and Mr. Hawkins — both living in Manhattan at the time — as well as four of their colleagues, made plans to go to dinner at a nearby restaurant the following week.

“I was very excited, probably more excited than Brantley about getting the chance to get to know him a little better,” Ms. Krishnan said. “As a summer associate, I was definitely going there to talk to Brantley to see if anything might happen between us before I went back to finish law school.”

She sat across from him and they took part in a conversation that lasted five hours.

“I found her to be very forward,” Mr. Hawkins said. “She was direct and extremely engaging.”

It wasn’t long before they realized something was there. “It was as if I had known him for a long time,” she said. “It was a super different feeling than anything I had experienced with any other man I had gone out with.”

Six months later, they were dating, and after a somewhat long-distance relationship between New York and Philadelphia, where Ms. Krishnan was finishing her law degree, Mr. Hawkins proposed in August 2018.

“Being with Brantley has been so transformative for me,” Ms. Krishnan said. “I never felt that I could really be myself until I met him, but we are on the same page in terms of our values and the way we figure out life.”