Anna Zhang didn’t want to raise any eyebrows by getting caught with a man.
In June 2020, she was living with her family in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, where she grew up. Coming from a strict Chinese family — and with several relatives living on the same block — Ms. Zhang asked Mohammed Naimul Alam Bhuiyan to pick her up a block away from her house for their first date.
Mr. Bhuiyan, who goes by Naim, grew up just 10 blocks from Ms. Zhang, yet they had never crossed paths until matching on Hinge that month. For their date, he borrowed his brother’s motorcycle to pick her up in style and make a good first impression. His plan worked.
“He knew what he was doing,” Ms. Zhang said. “I loved how spontaneous it was.” They went to Caesar’s Bay in southern Brooklyn and walked along the waterfront, ending the night with ice cream from a Mister Softee truck.
In the weeks that followed during the pandemic, he frequently picked her up, and they went to the park and talked about growing up in southern Brooklyn and their ambitions. “I’m a chatterbox,” Mr. Bhuiyan said. “And she was just very easy to talk to.
In November, on the first anniversary of Mr. Bhuiyan’s father’s death, Mr. Bhuiyan went to his father’s grave and returned home to his new apartment in Sunset Park that he had recently moved into. Ms. Zhang was waiting for him, sitting on the floor of the unfurnished apartment. When he saw her there, the words slipped out of his mouth: “I love you,” he said for the first time.
“That’s so crazy,” she replied. She handed him a letter that she had written for him. In it, she wrote, “Your papa sounds like an incredible man. Thank you for sharing stories about your dad with me, Naim. He raised an awesome son. I love you so much.”
Mr. Bhuiyan read it out loud. It was an emotional moment for the two.
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Ms. Zhang, 31, owns an eyebrow bar in Sunset Park called Babyface Brows. She graduated from N.Y.U. with a bachelor’s degree in media culture and communications. Mr. Bhuiyan, also 31, is a vice president in residential mortgage-backed security surveillance at Morningstar, a financial services company. He graduated from the University at Buffalo with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics.
On Aug. 23, Mr. Bhuiyan proposed at a sunset campfire at a resort in Lenox, Mass., when he sent her a video via AirDrop of him asking her parents for their blessing in Chinese. At the end of the video, a caption read, “Your parents gave permission. Now it’s up to you.”
“As soon as I opened the video and I saw my parents, I just instantly started bawling,” Ms. Zhang said.
On Sept. 1, the couple decided to get married in three weeks. Mr. Bhuiyan’s friend and the wedding photographer, Rafiya Alam, helped coordinate the vendors and bring it all together.
On Sept. 21, the couple were married before 150 guests at Diyanet Mosque of Brooklyn Eyup Sultan, a mosque in Brighton Beach. Imam Sefat Shafique officiated. The reception that followed was at Hamilton Loft in Red Hook.
The celebration was a tapestry of their Bangladeshi and Chinese cultures. Their four-foot-long cake was made by a local Bangladeshi bakery, Four Corners Co., and was decorated with dragon fruit, guava, lychee and florals. Their wedding favors were Bangladeshi hand-woven fans and Chinese fans. And the night ended with trivia games where winners received cash in red Chinese envelopes, followed by a Mister Softee ice cream truck.
Since the wedding was planned haphazardly, they did forget some things, but it didn’t matter to them. “Whatever fell through the cracks, it just made our wedding that much more unique,” Mr. Bhuiyan said. For example, he forgot to get ice, but his friends came together last minute, got in a truck and went on an adventure to find enough ice for an entire wedding.
They catered food from Laghman Express, an Uyghur restaurant that was on The New York Times’ 2025 list of best restaurants in New York City. “If the food ain’t good, the wedding ain’t good,” he said.
Mr. Bhuiyan also secretly booked a violinist 13 hours before the wedding to play the theme song from “Bridgerton” when Ms. Zhang walked into the venue. She had once made a comment in passing about how she would love to have a “Bridgerton wedding.” Ms. Zhang, shocked, immediately started crying when she heard the music.
“It just felt like a very magical moment,” Ms. Zhang said. “I felt like Cinderella.”
Sadiba Hasan reports on love and culture for the Styles section of The Times.
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