Jonathan Raven Otcasek and Erin Minji Kim met at the center of the world. It was September 2014, their junior semester of college while studying abroad in London, and they were on a class outing to Greenwich, England — a town on London’s outskirts where the Prime Meridian, point 0.0 in the longitudinal system, passes through.
Mr. Otcasek noticed the words imprinted on Ms. Kim’s gray T-shirt: “Who needs a boyfriend when you have a record collection?” An avid music fan whose late father, Ric Ocasek, was the songwriter, rhythm guitarist and lead singer of the new wave band the Cars, Mr. Otcasek (who kept the silent “t” that his father had removed from the original Czech spelling of their surname) quickly deduced two important pieces of intelligence: Ms. Kim was single, and she liked music.
He had found his opening: “Hey, doesn’t that building look like the power station on the cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Animals’?” he asked, pointing toward the Greenwich Power Station across the River Thames. Except Ms. Kim had never heard of the record.
So Mr. Otcasek did what any serious courter would do: He pulled up an image of it on his phone while Ms. Kim stood there, awkward and amused.
Turned out he was sort of right (the building on the “Animals” cover was actually Battersea Power Station), but the conversation trailed off. The next day, on a group tour of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Ms. Kim overheard Mr. Otcasek, discussing Starship Titanic, a computer game designed by Douglas Adams, author of the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Ms. Kim, a huge fan of Mr. Adams, had never met anyone who had ever played it, let alone knew of it.
They reconnected at a school friend’s soiree about a week later, on Oct. 10, 2014. Their class had been reading Shakespeare; the party, dubbed “Love’s Liquor’s Lost,” was befittingly Bard themed. Ms. Kim and Mr. Otcasek spent the night talking and laughing, marveling that their paths had never crossed during their previous two years at the University of Chicago, where they were both studying English literature. They now consider that party the day they started dating.
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Pink Floyd notwithstanding, they shared similar musical tastes, favoring Bjork, the Velvet Underground, Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Talking Heads, Janelle Monae, Elvis Presley, Queen and Kraftwerk. Two weeks later, they went on their first official date to Highgate Cemetery to visit Mr. Adams’s memorial. Per tradition, they left pencils in a jar by his headstone. “I know it was unorthodox for a first date, but it led to great conversations about literature and mortality, and we got to discuss which headstones were the coolest,” Ms. Kim said.
By the end of the day, each thought the other was the coolest.
“Erin has this amazing, beautiful, analytical mind that is completely unmatched in anyone I’ve ever met,” Mr. Otcasek said. “You take a book or a play and she reads it once and can give you the most nuanced understanding of that work immediately. This also goes for people. Upon meeting someone, she has this amazing sense of who they are.”
The two had very different upbringings. Ms. Kim, now 30, whose parents immigrated from South Korea, was born and raised in the “sleepy suburb,” as she described it, of Fullerton, Calif. Her father, Roy Kim, is a civil engineer who worked at the Los Angeles Department of Transportation for over 30 years; her mother, Rachel, stayed at home to raise Ms. Kim and her younger brother, Justin.
Mr. Otcasek, also 30, doesn’t just have a famous father; his mother is the Czech-born supermodel and author Paulina Porizkova, the former face of Estee Lauder who has a sizable following on social media. Their life in New York City, where Mr. Otcasek grew up with a younger brother, Oliver Otcasek, was the opposite of sleepy.
To Mr. Otcasek, of course, his lineage was no big deal. “I’ve known my dad and my mom my entire life, by definition, and to me they’ve always been my parents,” he said. “I was kind of casual about it, even though I recognize it was kind of incredible.”
Ms. Kim wasn’t sure she knew the Cars. “At some point after we started dating someone said, ‘You know his dad is a musician and his mother is a model,’ and I listened to some of the songs,” she said. “I wasn’t really familiar with them. Then I hit upon ‘Just what I Needed’ and ‘Magic’ and realized I’d heard them many times before.”
“Erin called me and said she met a nice guy and there was something about her voice that told me this guy was special to her,” Mr. Kim, her father, said. “Right after I met Jonathan it was so plain to see that they were so perfect for each other.”
“I just look at them, how they love each other, how they’re in tune with each other, how nice they are to each other,” he added. “It’s not easy to be like that after however long they’ve been together. I just want to take a little of that and apply it to my life.”
Ms. Porizkova, the groom’s mother, also said that she and her boyfriend, Jeff Greenstein, often look to the couple for relationship advice. “When we’re playing board games, I’m a vicious competitor. But when Jonathan and Erin play together they play on a team.”
“Whatever they do,” she added, “it’s always Team Jonathan Erin.”
And yet there have been hurdles, including four years when they were long distance, plus the sudden death of Mr. Ocasek in September 2019.
Mr. Otcasek had to share his grief with the world. “My dad was a public figure,” he said. “Erin was my point of comfort at that time. Being on the phone with her was my reprieve from all of this huge stuff happening in my life.”
While they always knew that they would get married one day, Ms. Kim was clear that she wanted to wait until she was settled in her career. “Then it becomes a fully informed choice where you can stand together as equals,” she said.
Both Ms. Kim and Mr. Otcasek received bachelor’s degrees in English literature from the University of Chicago. Ms. Kim also graduated from N.Y.U. Law School and works as a lawyer at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher in New York City.
Mr. Otcasek received his M.F.A. in game design at N.Y.U. He works as a video game designer, multimedia artist and founding unity developer in the New York office of JARS AI, which develops interactive entertainment grounded in artificial intelligence systems.
In 2021, they moved in together in a downtown New York apartment. The following year, after Ms. Kim took the bar exam, they went on a celebratory trip to London. One afternoon, beneath a willow tree in Regent’s Park Japanese rose garden, Mr. Otcasek got down on one knee and proposed.
The couple married on Oct. 11 — 10 years and one day after the night they first connected — at the Unitarian Church of All Souls, in Manhattan. Emily DeTar Birt, an ordained minister of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Northern Westchester, officiated. After the ceremony, about 130 friends and family gathered for a reception at the Rainbow Room.
Throughout the celebration, the pair celebrated their different cultures. The wedding invitations and decorations were stamped with two face-to-face ducks, a reference to a Korean tradition in which wedded couples are gifted a pair of wooden ducks, signifying harmony and luck.
They also incorporated Czech traditions, including one in which the groom’s family sneaks into the couple’s wedding suite and piles furniture onto the bed. “The idea is if you want to get a good night’s sleep, you have to work together to get the furniture off,” Mr. Otcasek said.
They also added another in which Ms. Kim was voluntarily “kidnapped” during cocktail hour by the groom’s brother, Oliver, under the pretense that he wanted to take photos of her outside. Oliver then texted his brother a “ransom note” with clues about where they were — a grungy bar a few blocks away.
“Others at the party told Jonathan we had gone north — he ran several streets up that way before he realized he had gone the wrong direction, and then he turned around and sprinted to the pub to save me,” Ms. Kim said. “And pay the tab.”
On This Day
When Oct. 11, 2024
Where Unitarian Church of All Souls
Words to Love By The couple incorporated poetry into their readings at the ceremony. Ms. Kim chose Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You,” and Mr. Otcasek chose E.E. Cummings’s “I Carry Your Heart With Me.”
Additionally, each table was named after authors who had been important to the couple: Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, Wodehouse. The family table was, naturally, Adams.
Long-lasting Edifices Both their ceremony and reception venues were constructed in the 1930s, which mirrored the era of the literature they both studied in college. “These buildings have history, and we have a decade of history with each other,” said Ms. Kim.
Make a Wish Inspired by Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree” art installation, branches were displayed at the reception for attendees to tie messages to.
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