“Guess where this photo was taken” was the prompt John Sasscer Sanders Jr. gave alongside a photo on his Hinge dating profile. The image captured Mr. Sanders at a book-signing event for the sociologist Matthew Desmond during the 2023 National Book Festival in Washington.
Shannon Shiyi Wu had volunteered at the festival that year, and was familiar with Mr. Desmond’s work. So when Mr. Sanders liked one of her profile photos in September 2023, Ms. Wu checked out his profile and saw the photo from the festival. “I know exactly where that is,” she responded. “That book is ‘Poverty, by America.’” They chatted about how Ms. Wu had read Mr. Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Evicted,” and visited the exhibit it inspired at the National Building Museum in 2018.
It was the first of many shared interests for the couple. Their first date, days after they matched on Hinge, however, got off to a rough start when Mr. Sanders went to the wrong location of the coffee shop where they had agreed to meet. Once they pieced together the snafu and found each other 30 minutes later, the conversation flowed easily.
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She was “very easy to talk to, very engaging and fun,” Mr. Sanders said. “I thought she had a wonderful, distinctive laugh.”
Ms. Wu, 33, is the director of payment policy at the American Hospital Association. Born and raised in Libertyville, Ill., she received a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Princeton and a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Mr. Sanders, 37, who was born and raised in Chevy Chase, Md., has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Rice University, a master’s degree in accountancy from Notre Dame, and an M.B.A. from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. He is the senior manager of technical accounting at International Game Technology, a company that provides products and services for lotteries and casinos.
Their next dates through the fall of 2023 were a series of thoughtful pursuits, such as seeing a comedy show, trying Peruvian food, visiting the Rothko exhibition at the National Art Gallery, and dining at the Dabney, a Michelin-star restaurant in Washington.
It was on their first weekend away together that December, when Mr. Sanders invited her to his family home on the eastern shore of Maryland, that Ms. Wu realized their relationship had real promise. Looking over at him in the car en route, while listening to her favorite song by her favorite band (“I Need My Girl” by the National), she realized she didn’t want the ride to end. “‘Oh my gosh, I could be really serious with this guy,’” she recalled thinking.
Car rides were also where Mr. Sanders felt his affection blooming, albeit with different audio material. He loved listening to audiobooks like “Bad Blood” by John Carreyrou or “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin together while driving. “She has an incredible intellectual curiosity that was engaging from the start,” he said. “I learn so much from her.”
In November 2024, just over a year after they met, Mr. Sanders proposed to Ms. Wu near the Touchstone Gallery in downtown Washington. It was where they had gone on their second date, and steps from the spot where they first kissed. “I had previously said to him, I didn’t want a big scene or anything,” said Ms. Wu of their engagement conversations.
Their wedding on Feb. 28 was low-key as well. They married at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in a ceremony officiated by George Barbour, the branch chief of the marriage bureau, with just their parents and Mr. Sanders’s brothers and toddler nephew.
“I cried a little when I was reading my vows, and I think he also had to take a few breaths there,” Ms. Wu said. “I can’t imagine doing that in front of 100 or 200 people.”
The small group then shared a family-style meal at Ambar, a Balkan restaurant on Capitol Hill, ending with a hazelnut torte from the Heidelberg Pastry Shoppe in Arlington, Va. Their one more formal wedding touch: taking their portraits amid the soaring spaces and millions of books at the Library of Congress, which organizes the National Book Festival every year.
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