Raj Thakker first met Trisha Vijay on the Bollywood dance team at the University of California, Berkeley in September 2014. His first impression was that she wasn’t the type of person he’d normally befriend.
“I was always more on the quiet and reserved side,” Mr. Thakker said, “whereas she was more of the pretty, outgoing girl.”
But when the two teamed up to helped organize a fund-raiser for the dance team, they became fast friends. They discovered that they had been born in the same neighborhood in Fremont, Calif., though Ms. Vijay grew up there, while Mr. Thakker’s family moved to Saratoga, Calif. During the next couple of years, their respect and admiration for each other grew.
“He’d help other people on our team with their computer science coursework,” Ms. Vijay said. “I thought that was a really good quality. He’s extremely patient.”
Eventually, in late 2016, during Ms. Vijay’s senior year, they began dating. After she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics, Ms. Vijay, 29, remained in the San Francisco Bay Area and began working at Amazon, where she is now a principal product manager for Prime Video.
Mr. Thakker, 28, graduated the same year with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and is now a senior software engineer at YouTube, which is part of Google.
They trace back the romantic beginnings of their relationship to an evening in November 2016, when they ventured out of Berkeley for dinner at Kusakabe, a Japanese restaurant in San Francisco.
Ms. Vijay thought there could be something special between them. “Raj really went out of his way to help me in my classes and did random errands for me,” she said.
Still, she wasn’t sure exactly where they stood, and neither did he. “We didn’t know if our first date was a first date because we weren’t sure if we were in the friend zone or not,” Ms. Vijay said.
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Soon their feelings became obvious, and in December, they went on their first official date at a ceramics studio. The mugs they painted “live in my mom’s kitchen to this day,” Mr. Thakker said. After the semester ended, they took a road trip to Disneyland and had such a good time that they decided to become exclusive when they returned.
Six years later, on Dec. 26, 2022, Mr. Thakker booked a spontaneous trip for him and Ms. Vijay to Maui and proposed at sunrise on the Ironwood Cliffs, a hiking area on the Hawaiian island.
The couple were legally married June 27 by Madeline Plasencia, an officiant at the New York City Clerk’s office, at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau. A week and a half before that, they invited 200 friends and family members to a multiday wedding celebration outside Lisbon at four venues, including a 17th-century fort and a national palace. A Hindu ceremony, led by Madhu Shastri, a pandit, was held at the Palace of the Correio-Mor.
“We wanted people to feel like they’re sightseeing while they’re at the wedding,” Ms. Vijay said.
At the sangeet ceremony, they offered a tasting of Portuguese olive oil and ginja, a local cherry liqueur, and had a Portuguese gin bar. Musicians played fado, a traditional Portuguese style of music, during the cocktail hour. The bride’s father, Shyam Vijay, and a family friend sang a medley of her favorite songs from childhood.
Given the couple’s dance background, the sangeet, held at Forte da Cruz, was more advanced than usual. “A lot of time these sangeet dances have a lot of people who don’t really know how to dance,” Mr. Thakker said.
“I’d like to think ours was very special because we’ve got such a strong group of friends who are also dancers,” Ms. Vijay added.
The couple opened the performances with a dance of their own, choreographed by Mona Sampath Khan, a close friend who is the founder and artistic director of a dance company in the San Francisco Bay Area. Afterward, their friends from the U.C. Berkeley Bollywood dance team presented a 10-minute dance skit that traced their love story; a group of friends that Ms. Vijay met in ballet classes as a toddler performed a dance to music from “The Nutcracker”; and other friends showed off an Irish dance, a Chinese dragon ribbon dance and a hula dance.
A special musical flourish was added to the reception at the Queluz National Palace. A string quartet played songs by Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Beyoncé, as well as the Harry Potter theme song and “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from Disney’s animated film “Mulan.”
“We wanted a ‘Bridgerton’ vibe to fit the setting,” Ms. Vijay said.
After all the festivities, Ms. Vijay and Mr. Thakker continued celebrating with a “group-moon” in the Algarve in south Portugal with around 30 friends.
“It was a great time to share our favorite moments of the wedding and look at the photos,” Ms. Vijay said. “And it helped keep the scaries away. I haven’t felt any of the post-wedding blues.”
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