When Rachel Kelly Atcheson and Sean Adrian McElwee first met at a West Village coffee shop in June 2022, it was too tense to be a meet-cute. Ms. Atcheson — at the time, the senior assistant to Mayor Eric Adams — was planning to chew out Mr. McElwee, a pollster with whom she shared a mutual friend.
Mr. McElwee was conducting polling on behalf of Protect Our Future super PAC, which was backed by Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto billionaire later convicted of fraud. She was angry about political spending in general, including the more than $11 million that Protect Our Future put toward Carrick Flynn, a long-shot congressional candidate in Oregon.
As a proponent of effective altruism, Ms. Atcheson felt strongly that the money could have gone to charity.
Back then, Mr. McElwee was the head of Data for Progress, a progressive think tank and polling firm that he helped found in 2018. (In November 2022, five months after the coffee shop encounter, he was asked to step down amid betting allegations.)
The two are strong personalities with a penchant for debate and forging connections. Their conversation that day, they said, also covered polling he had done on voter support for animal welfare laws — an issue she, a vegan since high school, was very invested in.
So what began as verbal fisticuffs at the coffee shop quickly bloomed into romantic walks through Washington Square Park and jaunts to an East Village public pool.
Ms. Atcheson said that since Mr. McElwee’s experience with Data for Progress, “he is, in my mind, a better person today than when I met him.”
Ms. Atcheson, 33, is a food policy wonk who became deputy director in Mr. Adams’s office of food policy. She left the administration at the end of 2024 to start a nonprofit, Food Policy Pathways, for which she is executive director. She was raised in Washington, D.C., and graduated with a bachelor’s in philosophy from Boston University.
Mr. McElwee, 32, grew up in an evangelical family in Ledyard, Conn. He received a bachelor’s degree in politics, philosophy and economics at the King’s College, a Christian school in New York City, before earning his master’s in quantitative methods in social sciences at Columbia.
“I think of bad relationships as ‘lowest common denominator’ relationships,” Mr. McElwee said. “Each person pulls the other down. If one eats poorly, the other will eat poorly. But a good relationship is a ‘highest common denominator’ relationship.”
Since meeting Ms. Atcheson, Mr. McElwee has become more committed to healthy living — he also became vegan — and neither drinks alcohol. He is the founder of Positive Sum Strategies, a consulting firm that specializes in public opinion, strategic communications and advocacy strategy.
Ms. Atcheson said she had been transformed by the relationship, too: She had never pictured herself having children, but with Mr. McElwee, she does.
Their lives became integrated quickly and seamlessly: In November 2022, she moved into Mr. McElwee’s apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, where they continue to live, and became engaged in August 2023.
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On June 5, the couple was married by Yanfang Chen, an officiant at the Manhattan City Clerk’s office. Their parents were in attendance.
Two days later, they held a celebration at Tamerlaine Sanctuary & Preserve in Montague, N.J. The 202 guests — including plant-based nonprofit employees, hedge fund managers, alternative-protein-focused venture capitalists and political consultants — were invited to participate in “community-building breakout sessions,” as they called them, which included salsa lessons, improv, a storytelling workshop and board games.
The drizzly weather cleared in time for the ceremony portion of what they called “a learning wedding.” After a guided meditation and a pause for Ms. Atcheson’s introductory speech, the couple exchanged their vows. Mr. McElwee promised to “keep building together” and made several references to the bride’s preternatural ability to connect others.
Guests were instructed to fill out a questionnaire before the wedding and were sent a spreadsheet listing the other guests and their LinkedIn profiles. A plant-based catering company, Jam Cakery Events, provided food for the BYOB reception, and in place of gifts, the couple requested that every guest write them a one-page letter in advance. The letters were compiled into a notebook to be read and enjoyed on their honeymoon.
“I’ve never been to a wedding like this,” said Stanley Wang, a regular at the McElwee-Atcheson poker nights.
The energy of the couple’s first meeting was some kind of portent — two rabble-rousers who long for nothing more than a spirited discourse.
“Marriage for us will be a long debate,” Mr. McElwee said to Ms. Atcheson, who wore a thrifted ball gown, in front of their guests. “When we debate, we grow, and I vow to always debate and grow with you.”
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