On the eve of his 33rd birthday in November 2021, Seun Olawole Akinboboye was at the rooftop bar at the Ace Hotel in Chicago, now closed, when he saw a woman beckoning to him.
“It was so emphatic and so confident that I just decided to walk over,” said Mr. Akinboboye, who pronounces his first name Shay-oon. The woman was the best friend of Taylar Dorthea McFadden Wade.
“I told her, ‘I need to meet this guy — that’s my husband,’” Ms. Wade said. “She played wingwoman, brought him over and introduced us, and we talked the rest of the night.”
The day after Ms. Wade met Mr. Akinboboye, she flew to her hometown, Greensboro, N.C. At the time, she was working remotely between Chicago and Greensboro and was unsure of where she wanted to live. In early December, she returned to Chicago for a first date with Mr. Akinboboye at Flight Club, a bar and eatery where people play darts.
“We were talking so much that we never got around to the darts,” Ms. Wade said.
Over the next several months, Ms. Wade returned to Chicago for weeks at a time, staying with a friend while building a relationship with Mr. Akinboboye. One evening, Ms. Wade, who has Type 1 diabetes, had an emergency and needed to go to the hospital.
Mr. Akinboboye accompanied her and communicated with her mother throughout.
“My mom was very impressed because Seun was doing everything she would have done,” Ms. Wade said. “Her ideal dream is someone who’ll take care of me the same way she would, and the fact that he did that so early in our relationship put her at ease.”
Mr. Akinboboye, 37, is a finance director at a facilities services company based in Tampa, Fla. He was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, and grew up in Teaneck, N.J., and later in Roslyn, N.Y. He has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from N.Y.U., a master’s degree in management from Wake Forest University and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Ms. Wade, 33, is a senior product manager for Brilliant, a San Francisco-based company that partners with organizations to create custom branded gifts. She was born and raised in Greensboro, and moved to Chicago in 2014, after graduating from Spelman College with a bachelor’s degree in English. Ms. Wade and Mr. Akinboboye have lived in Detroit since 2024.
In February 2022, three months into their relationship, Mr. Akinboboye was offered a job as an investment banking associate in San Francisco. He asked Ms. Wade if she would move there with him.
“I’d never asked anyone to move in with me or to move across the country with me,” Mr. Akinboboye said. “In my mind, there was a 99 percent likelihood that she would say no. But the 1 percent chance she’d say yes was too enticing.”
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The decision wasn’t easy for Ms. Wade.
“We were madly in love, but moving across the country and signing a lease together, that’s a big deal, and three months was still early,” she said.
In the end, she decided that she didn’t want to live wondering “what if,” so the following month, in March 2022, she and her cockapoo, Coltrane, joined Mr. Akinboboye in San Francisco.
“Meeting, moving in together and moving across the country is a fairy-tale story, but there are challenges,” Mr. Akinboboye said. “We’re really thankful for that period because it forced us to work on our relationship.”
On July 4, 2024, Mr. Akinboboye surprised Ms. Wade in Greensboro before she, her mother and sister planned to attend a family reunion in South Carolina. Without revealing where they were headed, he drove her to the Biltmore Estate, a historic property in Asheville, N.C., with several hotels on the property. When Ms. Wade walked into their room, the floor and bed were strewn with flower petals, and Mr. Akinboboye was down on one knee.
Ms. Wade discovered that weeks earlier, Mr. Akinboboye had taken a detour to Greensboro while on a business trip to Charlotte to ask her mother for permission to propose.
Ms. Wade and Mr. Akinboboye were married Nov. 9 at the Planterra Conservatory in West Bloomfield, Mich., with 125 guests in attendance. Pastor Fikre Prince from Woodside Bible Church in Detroit, which the couple attends, officiated.
The wedding included the jumping of the broom, as well as the Nigerian “money dance.”
“We didn’t even know this would happen,” Mr. Akinboboye said. “We found ourselves in the center of the dance floor, with our close friends and family showering dollar bills over us.”
For Mr. Akinboboye, one highlight was Pastor Prince.
“He and his wife have been spiritual leaders for our relationship,” he said. “As we were looking at each other and exchanging our vows, we incorporated some of the learnings from our premarital counseling. One that stuck with me was that the vows we’re exchanging are not merely to each other, but also before our Lord and Savior.”
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