Lauren Michelle Fogel’s grandmother had a good feeling about Benjamin Michael Sweeney.
“‘What a nice boy,’” Ms. Fogel recalled her maternal “grandma” saying. “‘Maybe you’ll marry him one day.’”
Fresh out of college in August 2018, the two were newly hired analysts at Capital One in New York and had just finished a weeklong orientation in Tysons Corner, Va.
“I thought she was cute,” said Mr. Sweeney, 29. So he didn’t mind the wait at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport as severe thunderstorms caused flight delays back to New York.
“It bought me four hours to get to know her,” said Mr. Sweeney, who graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan. He is now the head of data at Bandit Running, a running apparel company in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Ms. Fogel, 30, who graduated with distinction in commerce from the University of Virginia, is now a senior product manager at LinkedIn in New York. When their plane, which was diverted from LaGuardia, debarked at Westchester County Airport at 3 a.m., Mr. Sweeney invited Ms. Fogel to stay at his parents’ house in Katonah, where he grew up.
“I didn’t want her to be stranded in White Plains,” said Mr. Sweeney, but she already had a car booked from the airport to her grandparents’ house in Westwood, N.J., and wowed her grandmother the next day, recounting Mr. Sweeney’s sweet gesture.
Ms. Fogel, who grew up in Indianapolis, actually had a boyfriend at the time. She occasionally saw Mr. Sweeney with colleagues at happy hours or bumped into him walking to their Flatiron district offices from Murray Hill, where they each found apartments.
After her relationship ended the following January, Ms. Fogel asked Mr. Sweeney to a New York Rangers hockey game after her uncle gave her his last-minute tickets.
“I was so excited,” she said. “But, I didn’t know if he liked me, or just wanted to go to the Rangers game.”
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En route, they stopped at Eataly, where they washed down sandwiches with Negronis, which Mr. Sweeney didn’t care for, but stoically drank.
“He was funny and had a calm energy,” she said. “He cared a lot about his work.”
After he walked her home, the evening ended without a kiss.
“I was hopeful,” she said, and on a rainy Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks later, they took the subway to Housing Works Bookstore cafe in SoHo, where they chatted and read a little over croissants and coffee. But still no kiss.
“She’s totally beautiful, totally lovely,” he said, and later walked her home. “I wanted to kiss her, but didn’t know how to act on it.”
On Thursday evening that week, they got a little flirty at Beer Run, a bar with a runner’s theme in Chelsea, and later, as she had hoped, there was a first kiss.
They enjoyed comedy clubs, music venues and eating out together, but in May, after Mr. Sweeney got word that he would likely be working in her office, he ended things. He didn’t want to mix work and romance.
“I was very upset,” she said, and in August 2019, he actually joined her team.
In August 2020, while the two were working remotely during the pandemic, they ran into each other several times while walking or running along the East River, where they soon started taking walks or running together.
“I saw him as a good friend and close co-worker,” she said, and when they planned to work on a big presentation over dinner at her place, he arrived with dinner, but no laptop.
“I thought we could just have dinner together,” he said, and they began dating again.
Mr. Sweeney, who loves to cook, experimented with flavors in Mexican, Indian and Indian food, and they often played the deck-building board game Dominion.
In January 2021, after she became a product manager in advertising at The New York Times, where she stayed until July 2022, and they no longer worked together, he introduced her as his girlfriend when they joined his friends for dinner at GupShup, an Indian restaurant in Gramercy Park.
By fall 2021, they were talking about their future.
On a dock in Boothbay, Maine, in October 2024, as clouds rolled in, and a photographer came out of hiding from a footbridge, he got down on one knee with a ring. After she said yes, she met him on one knee.
Usually, while Mr. Sweeney underwent infusions every other week in New York for Pompe, a rare genetic metabolic disease he was diagnosed with in 2024, they planned their July 4, 2026, wedding at TenMile Station, a mid-mountain lodge at Breckenridge Ski Resort in Colorado, where they often went skiing.
But recently they kept her father in mind. He is being treated for leukemia in Houston, and could not possibly attend in July after a stem cell transplant later in April required a 100-day recovery period.
“We can still do the July wedding,” said Mr. Sweeney, who suggested an earlier elopement. “Let’s go to Houston.”
Ten days later, on April 5, Jessica K. Marshall, ordained as a reform rabbi by Hebrew Union College, officiated before their parents at the Oak Atelier’s Willow Room in Conroe, Texas. Ms. Marshall is to lead the July celebration, before about 150 guests.
“Ben is a rock,” Ms. Fogel said. “Pushing us to be better versions of ourselves. He cares so much about family and friends.”
She then added: “Grandma knew best.”
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