Anna Sankey Russell and Mainak Ghosh met in the fall of 2012 when both joined St. Anthony Hall, a literary society at Yale. “I would always enjoy our conversations,” Ms. Russell said. “I never knew what he was going to say next.”
Their memories from that chapter of their lives are somewhat hazy. But one encounter stands out for Mr. Ghosh, who remembers telling Ms. Russell that he was tone deaf, then singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to prove it.
“Wow, you’re really bad,” he recalled her saying.
The two remained casual friends throughout their undergraduate years at Yale, but lost touch for a while after Mr. Ghosh graduated a year before Ms. Russell.
The following decade would be littered with chance encounters, including mutual friends’ weddings and alumni get-togethers. They would catch up as old friends, then return to their respective lives.
Their friendship began to take a turn in November 2023, when they saw each other at a dinner for mutual friends who were passing through New York. The meeting place was a restaurant, the name of which they can’t recall, in Long Island City, Queens, which was a hike for both Ms. Ghosh and Ms. Russell. He was living in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and she in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.
They left dinner together, making their way by foot across an unlit Pulaski Bridge, as they reminisced and talked about their current lives.
“Even a decade later, it was good to be able to connect,” Mr. Ghosh said.
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Ms. Russell, 33, who goes by Nina, is a Ph.D. student studying jurisprudence and social policy at the University of California, Berkeley. She was born and raised in Charlottesville, Va. She holds a bachelor’s degree in politics and economics from Yale and a master’s in global affairs from Tsinghua University in Beijing, where she was a Schwarzman Scholar, and a law degree from New York University School of Law.
Mr. Ghosh, 34, who was born and raised in West Bengal, India, is the head of product at Ironlight, a blockchain-based securities trading platform. He holds bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Yale and an M.B.A. from M.I.T.
Over the next few months, they connected more regularly. Mr. Ghosh invited Ms. Russell to several parties, which she sparsely attended. In October 2024, some other mutual friends were getting married in Maryland, so they planned to drive there together.
On the night after the wedding, the two stayed in a log cabin in the woods at Camp Misty Mount in Thurmont, Md. After settling in their rooms, Ms. Russell headed to the married couple’s cabin to set up their sleeping bags while Mr. Ghosh dozed off. When he woke up an hour later, she still wasn’t back — and her phone was on her bed.
Frightened that something might have happened to Ms. Russell, Mr. Ghosh hurried into the damp and cold woods, only to find the car missing. “My first thought is, ‘Oh my God, she abandoned me,’” he said.
Ms. Russell hadn’t abandoned Mr. Ghosh; she was lost. Unable to find her way back, she resigned herself to sleeping in the car — until she saw a light bobbing from a distance.
It was Mr. Ghosh. The two shared a hug.
They headed back home the next morning. Mr. Ghosh drove while Ms. Russell studied for her 11 a.m. law school class. When he got tired, they switched, and he read her materials aloud so she could continue studying.
A couple of weeks later, Ms. Russell asked Mr. Ghosh if he would like to have dinner at her place, as she would be roasting a chicken. When they finished eating, she asked, “Would you like to kiss?” They did.
In the following weeks, they didn’t see much of each other. Ms. Russell was finishing up a semester at law school and Mr. Ghosh headed to Peru to hike the Inca Trail, where he suffered from food poisoning. In his “delirious” state, he said, he realized he wanted to marry Ms. Russell.
When Mr. Ghosh returned, they took a trip to East Chatham, N.Y. On Christmas Eve, huddled by the fireplace, they made their relationship official.
The couple got engaged in July 2025 during a trip to Singapore, at the Gardens by the Bay, an urban park and conservatory.
On Jan. 24, they were married in a self-uniting ceremony before 65 guests at the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh. (Pennsylvania allows self-uniting marriages.)
“We liked the normative significance of it,” Ms. Russell said. “The power to bind ourselves comes from us.”
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