Kibriyaá Sahara Morgan won over Caleb Moore Freundlich’s family before the two ever even met.
They were both New York City kids who had been in the same prep school orbit since they were 5. Freundlich, who grew up in the West Village of Manhattan, attended Friends Seminary in the Gramercy neighborhood, and Morgan, who grew up primarily in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn, attended the Chapin School on the Upper East Side.
In 2013, Freundlich’s younger sister, Liv, was considering transferring to Chapin and visited the school with her parents. Morgan, then a sophomore at Chapin, was part of a panel tasked with persuading parents of prospective students to enroll their children in the school. “I was a heavy hitter,” Morgan said, recalling her impressive recruiting record.
Among the parents she won over was the actress Julianne Moore, Freundlich’s mother, who was so impressed by her charisma and sense of humor that Freundlich recalled his mother coming home that day and telling him, “I chatted to this girl Ki, she was so great. She was so cool.” (Liv graduated from Chapin in 2020.)
Morgan’s name came up again after she and Freundlich — who go by Ki and Cal — graduated from high school in 2016. While in Montauk that summer, Moore ran into Veronika Kailich, Morgan’s best friend at Chapin, who mentioned that Morgan would be attending Davidson College in North Carolina that fall. As it happened, Freundlich was headed there, too. Moore returned and gave Freundlich the update about the hilarious, cool girl she had met at Chapin years ago.
Freundlich, intrigued, looked Morgan up on Facebook. “I saw that she was a baddie and played basketball” at Chapin, he said. “Captain of basketball,” Morgan clarified.
Kailich tried to get the two to hang out that summer, but it wasn’t until an honor code signing at Davidson, just before the fall semester began, that the two finally met. They were seated close to each other, and Freundlich recognized her. He nervously deliberated what his opening line should be before tapping her on the shoulder and saying, “You know Veronika, right?”
“Cal?” Morgan said.
“Ki?” Freundlich responded.
When they saw each other again a few days later in French 102, they found out they lived in the same dormitory, one floor apart. They started doing homework together and watching the U.S. Open from student lounges. She brought him to parties thrown by the Black Student Coalition, where they danced to Fetty Wap and Drake.
Morgan and Freundlich, now both 28, became best friends. Both were in relationships, so there was no romantic intention, but they said they had an undeniable chemistry.
Over winter break that freshman year, Freundlich invited Morgan to his family’s West Village home. “We were having a great time and clearly really flirting,” said Freundlich, who, by this point, was single. Morgan’s relationship was approaching its end. “But she still kind of has this boyfriend, and my mom is saying to her, ‘What’s up with this boyfriend?’” Freundlich said, adding that his family picked up on their chemistry.
Shortly afterward, Morgan’s relationship officially ended. In February 2017, they had their first date at a diner near campus, where her instincts as a best friend kicked in. When their food arrived, Freundlich experienced his first anxiety attack. As a member of Davidson’s basketball team, Freundlich felt pressure to gain weight, and the stress surrounding food and eating had begun to take a toll on him. Morgan was able to console him and uplift him through the episode.
“This was something that really plagued me in college,” Freundlich said about the anxiety attacks. “And she was the only true person that I felt like I could be comfortable with this part of me that I was trying to figure out over the years.”
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As they learned more about each other over the years, their complementary qualities have shaped and enriched one another.
“Cal has softened Ki in a really beautiful way, and Ki grounds Cal,” said Kailich, their mutual friend. “Cal is the creative type who kind of has his head in the clouds, and Ki is just a very rational grounding force.”
Freundlich is the son of Moore and Bart Freundlich, the film director and screenwriter. He received a bachelor’s degree in music and media from Davidson and a master’s in music from N.Y.U. He is a musician whose debut album, “Matter of Time,” was released earlier this year. He is also a film composer and an adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where he teaches music production for animation projects.
Morgan is the daughter of Ali Morgan, the head of an independent school in St. Croix, and Keron Carmichael, a nurse. She graduated from Davidson with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and is an associate director in content business operations at Morning Brew Inc., a business news company.
In August 2020, after graduating from Davidson during the Covid-19 pandemic, the couple moved into a studio apartment in the West Village, where Freundlich has made it a daily tradition to make Morgan a cup of coffee every morning. In the evening, he makes her black tea, a tradition she adopted from her Caribbean family. (Her father’s roots are in St. Croix, and her mother’s in Guyana.)
In August 2024, he proposed in their apartment. As Morgan climbed the stairs to their fifth floor walk-up, where Freundlich was waiting for her with a Fred Leighton diamond ring, she heard Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky” playing inside. When she stepped inside the apartment, the wall was covered with photos from their relationship, divided into stages.
“The first one was ‘Electric,’ which is a song of ours and how we felt when we first met,” Freundlich said. “And then the last stage was ‘Home.’ It was like the home that we’d built in the apartment that we were in.”
They celebrated with dinner at Via Carota, where he pulled out one more surprise: Both their families were seated in a private room he had reserved, all immediate family members present together for the first time. In September 2025, the couple moved to Dumbo.
On Oct. 8, they married at Brooklyn Borough Hall. Waldo Ramirez, a city clerk, officiated before two of their close friends, Lauren Lord and Kendall Johnson. As Ramirez delivered the legal pronouncement, Freundlich and Morgan both began to cry. “I remember feeling almost like it can’t even get better than this,” Freundlich said.
“Cut to two days later, we’re having literally the best weekend of our lives,” he continued.
Their wedding weekend began on Oct. 10 with a welcome party at Lyonshare Public House in Beacon, N.Y. Though Freundlich wasn’t planning to perform at the wedding, there was a piano in the corner of the restaurant, and Morgan suggested he play a song. He played “Ours,” a song he had written for her, and she sang along: “It took just a second to know it was ours.”
The ceremony and reception were the following day at the Roundhouse in Beacon, N.Y., with about 140 guests. They woke up that morning at 6 a.m., the sky blanketed in shades of pink and purple before a rainstorm took over the rest of the day. But that didn’t cloud their day. Morgan said it felt like “that was what was supposed to happen. The same thing happened the night that he proposed: There was a big storm and it rained, and we were supposed to take photos outside.”
At the venue’s indoor location, in front of grand windows revealing orange and yellow autumn trees, Freundlich walked into the ceremony, arm in arm with his mother and father, to an instrumental version of “Cranes in the Sky,” as a nod to the proposal. Morgan walked in with her father to “How Many Times” by Mack Keane.
At the reception that followed, the couple opened up the dance floor before appetizers even arrived, Freundlich removing his Prada tuxedo jacket as they hit the “Wobble” dance together. But that’s the kind of life-of-the-party extroverts they are, feeding off each other front and center.
“As a pair, I feel like they have this radiating energy, and you can really feel it when you walk into any room,” Kailich said. “Ki’s dad said that they are the couple you want to invite to any event — and it’s true.”
On This Day
When Oct. 11, 2026
Where The Roundhouse in Beacon, N.Y.
First Dance Classics For their first dance, the couple dipped and spun to “Bed I Made” by Allen Stone. Morgan and her father danced to “As” by Stevie Wonder, and Freundlich and his mother danced to “Give Me Love” by George Harrison.
The After-Party and The After-After-Party After the reception, the couple held an after party that they were shocked so many people showed up to in the pouring rain at 11 p.m., including “some old heads,” Freundlich said. Once that was over, they transitioned to their suite, 20 people seated on their floor eating leftovers with Bravo playing on the television.
The Speeches A speech-heavy wedding included toasts from the maid of honor, best man and both sets of parents.
“I’ve been asked what Ki used to say she wanted in a partner. Her answer was, ‘Someone like Dad,’” her father, Ali Morgan, said. “I’m deeply humbled by that. And Cal, I have to admit, you followed the guideline to a tee. You’re basically me. You’re just taller. With red hair.”
In her speech, Moore said: “They have seen one another through college, Covid, early adulthood, career changes, their first apartment, their second apartment, Ben the cat! They’ve forged their partnership as teenagers and grown up together. I marvel at their commitment, and I celebrate their love.”
The post She Won His Family Over Years Before Their First Date appeared first on New York Times.
