Zachary Brian Lee Copeland’s dating app adventures in Washington, D.C., weren’t worthy of lunchtime discussion with his co-workers until the autumn of 2019, when he matched with Joelle Carissa Gamble on Hinge.
Ms. Gamble, then a principal at Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm, struck him as a potential soul mate. A profile picture of a “Lord of the Rings” tattoo on her back telegraphed a relatable interest in fantasy fiction; she, too, liked the board game Settlers of Catan.
“I had been telling my co-clerks I was excited to go on a date with this Joelle person,” said Mr. Copeland, then a judicial law clerk at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. But the date he had arranged at a Washington bar days after they started messaging on the app never happened. Though both had been convinced they would hit it off, Ms. Gamble diced the date with just hours to spare.
“I thought he was very cute, and he liked the same nerdy things I did, which basically is not that common,” she said. But “I was a little sporadic with my dating at the time. I didn’t know what I was doing or what I wanted.” Mr. Copeland, though “definitely bummed,” he said, responded with equanimity. “The text he sent me back after I canceled was so sweet I felt even worse.” More than a year later, when they matched again on Bumble, he was just as gracious.
Ms. Gamble, 33, is a self-described economic policy enthusiast. Until early March, she was a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director at the White House National Economic Council and is now looking for a new position. Her passion for public service comes from her parents, she said, who raised Ms. Gamble and her younger sister in Riverside, Calif. Both were Marines before her mother became a preschool teacher and her father a Los Angeles police officer.
Growing up, “I got used to thinking a lot about how to help other people,” she said. At U.C.L.A., where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in international development studies, she was a student activist promoting college affordability. Her master’s degree in economics and public policy is from Princeton.
A year after she canceled her 2019 date with Mr. Copeland, she became an economic adviser to the Biden presidential transition team. By the time she matched with him again on Bumble, in February 2021, she was doing damage control on her personal life. Until then, “I wasn’t ready to be dating, I don’t think.”
Mr. Copeland, 34, is special assistant to the general counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense. He grew up in Yakima, Wash., with his parents and an older sister before earning his bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Washington. He later graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he served on the Harvard Law Review.
He, too, moved to Washington in 2019. Like Ms. Gamble, he was more attuned to his work than his dating apps when they matched the first time. That hadn’t changed much for either when she reached out to him on Bumble.
What had changed was her dating profile, including her pictures. Neither recognized the other from the date that had been scotched when Ms. Gamble texted Mr. Copeland with her phone number days after they matched the second time. “His name was already in my phone,” she said. Hers was already in his, too. But both pretended not to remember what happened in 2019 when, on Feb. 13, 2021, they met via FaceTime — by then, the world was in the grips of the pandemic — for a first date.
Mr. Copeland had consulted his former co-clerks for advice about whether to bring it up. “I told them, ‘Joelle is back. Should I tell her about our history?’” They counseled him to stay mum. For a month, as they progressed from chatting on FaceTime to meeting in person to feeling that, professional lives aside, they wanted to spend a lot more time together, the Hinge episode went unacknowledged.
Ms. Gamble finally brought it up. “I screwed up, I realized,” she said. Mr. Copeland no longer cared. Six months in, they were a committed couple. In May 2022, they moved to an apartment in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington together. Well before he surprised her with a proposal on the Georgetown waterfront on March 5, 2023, they knew they wanted to marry each other.
Their March 16 wedding, at the George Peabody Library in Baltimore, was attended by 100 guests and officiated by the Rev. William Mies, a Catholic priest affiliated with the International Council of Community Churches. The library atmosphere, both said, was less an evocation of their lives as public service people than a full-tilt swerve into their appreciation for fantasy. Music from the soundtracks to “Lord of the Rings,” “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars” played in the 19th-century building, known as “the cathedral of books.” An excerpt from a Tolkien poem also punctuated the ceremony. “It fit our vibe perfectly,” Ms. Gamble said.
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