When Ayokunle Olufemi Apampa first joined the Goldman Sachs office in Salt Lake City in 2011, there were about 20 Black professionals in the entire building, he said. He and a few colleagues led efforts to build a community of Black professionals in the city, which included recruiting summer interns.
Nia-Imani Adyira Mitchell, who joined a summer program at Goldman Sachs in 2017, was one of those interns. Before the internship started, a few members of the Black Network, an employee resource group at the office, held a welcome barbecue during the Memorial Day weekend. There, Mr. Apampa, who goes by Kunle, and Ms. Mitchell first locked eyes while he was flipping burgers behind the grill. He gave her a wave.
“Maybe he was checking me out,” Ms. Mitchell, 29, recalled thinking.
“I did notice her,” Mr. Apampa, 35, said. “And I did also notice that people were trying to get her attention.”
Throughout the summer, they saw each other during events organized by Black professionals in the city. But when her internship ended, she returned to New York, where she completed her final year at the University at Buffalo and received a bachelor’s degree in business administration.
They kept in touch professionally over the years, and in the summer of 2019, Mr. Apampa moved to Jersey City, N.J., for three months before settling in Brooklyn. Ms. Mitchell was living with her family in New Windsor, in Orange County, N.Y.
Mr. Apampa, who is from Lagos, Nigeria, and earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, had transferred from Goldman Sachs’s Salt Lake City office to the New York office. When he texted Ms. Mitchell about his move, he also intended to ask her out on a date. “I really liked Nia’s approach to life,” Mr. Apampa said. “I was hitting her up to really try to figure out, like, what’s up?”
“I could tell he was trying to get my attention,” Ms. Mitchell said. But she wasn’t engaging much. She had just started a new role as an analyst at Bloomberg, and was “fighting for my life,” she said. She spent the summer studying for exams and learning the ropes of the job. Months later, in November 2019, she was ready to meet up with him, and she sent him a time, place and date to grab lunch.
They met at Glaze Teriyaki in Union Square. “At that point, he was definitely flirting with me,” Ms. Mitchell said. “He’s Nigerian. He’s a slick talker. But I’m a sharpshooter, too, because I’m Jamaican, so I already know how to handle him.”
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It wasn’t until a night out at a club in Chelsea in February 2020 that his efforts to court her finally gained traction.
“He started being a lot more attractive to me,” Ms. Mitchell said, recalling his eccentric style back in Salt Lake City. He often wore a blue shirt with purple pants, yellow socks and green shoes. But after moving to New York, he went to the gym consistently and upgraded his look. “He glowed up,” Ms. Mitchell said.
“You see everyone else, and you’re like, I got to step my swag game up,” Mr. Apampa added.
That night in February, they shared a kiss before they said goodbye. “After that, the world shut down,” Ms. Mitchell said, referring to the Covid-19 pandemic. “The last night out before the world totally closed was with him, so it was special to me.”
For her birthday on March 27, Mr. Apampa surprised her outside her home with a chocolate cake, champagne and gifts. That summer, they became official, and the following year, they moved in together to an apartment in Dumbo.
Mr. Apampa proposed during a trip to Montego Bay, Jamaica, on July 26, 2023, the birthday of Ms. Mitchell’s mother. She had died in 2011.
Mr. Apampa is a director in asset management at the Capricorn Investment Group, and Ms. Mitchell is a senior people operations manager at AnswerLab, a user-experience research firm.
On June 8, the couple were married at Valley Regency in Clifton, N.J., in front of 150 guests. Mariela Catalina Hill, ordained by the American Marriage Ministries, officiated.
The couple donated a portion of their cash fund registry to Vow for Girls, a nonprofit group focused on ending child marriages globally. It was an important cause for Mr. Apampa, an angel investor in startups and fund managers throughout Africa. Two-thirds of his portfolio is invested in female entrepreneurs.
In his vows, Mr. Apampa nodded to their wedding date, 6/8/25, sharing six reasons he loves her, eight reasons he will continue to love her and 25 promises.
Their celebration included several nods to their Jamaican and Nigerian backgrounds. They jumped the broom to “One Love” by Bob Marley. At the cocktail hour, John Randolph, a violinist, played Afrobeats tracks by Davido, Burna Boy and Wizkid. During the reception, after changing outfits, they walked into a ballroom waving huge Jamaican and Nigerian flags. And the theme of the after-party at Polygon, an event venue in Brooklyn, was “Afrobeats meets Dancehall.”
“It was lit; that Jamaican-Nigerian energy definitely came through,” Mr. Apampa said. The celebration carried over into the wee hours of the morning.
Sadiba Hasan reports on love and culture for the Styles section of The Times.
The post A Celebration With Big ‘Jamaican-Nigerian Energy’ appeared first on New York Times.
