After a workout at a gym in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in October 2021, Prakhar Gupta stopped by a nearby rooftop bar to meet friends for drinks before a concert.
When Claudia Fernanda Robles-Gil, a recent addition to the friend group, walked in, he noticed her immediately.
“I thought she was cute and had spice,” Mr. Gupta said. “She was teasing me a little bit.”
Although their first meeting was brief, the two exchanged numbers and soon found themselves in a chat with their shared friends, called “NYC Rave Crew.”
“The group chat eventually noticed we were being flirty, so we took ourselves out,” Ms. Robles-Gil said.
Ms. Robles-Gil, 30, an artist who creates vibrant oil paintings, was born in Mexico City and lived there until her family moved to Boston when she was 9. She later returned to Mexico City for high school before coming back to the United States to attend Tufts University, where she earned a bachelor’s in psychology. In 2021, she moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
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Mr. Gupta, 29, is the founder and host of the Prakhar Gupta Xperience, an interview podcast. He was born in Faridabad, India, and lived there until he was 21, when he moved to New York to attend Columbia, from which he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and psychology.
On Halloween, Ms. Robles-Gil invited Mr. Gupta to a rave at the Brooklyn Mirage in East Williamsburg. After painting his face and those of several friends to resemble skeletons, the group spent two hours waiting in line in the cold to enter the music venue.
Inside, they were separated by the crowd, but once they found each other, Ms. Robles-Gil said, “We were talking and dancing all night. We saw each other the next day at a friend’s party, and the next day, too. We were pretty inseparable from early on.”
They began spending evenings on the Lower East Side on Mr. Gupta’s balcony, having conversations that, Ms. Robles-Gil said, “went very deep, very quickly.” For Thanksgiving, Ms. Robles-Gil invited Mr. Gupta to join her and a friend on a trip to Tulum. Shortly before they arrived, Ms. Robles-Gil’s paternal grandmother died.
“I was going through a life-changing thing, and he was there in a way you wouldn’t expect someone you’d just started dating to be,” Ms. Robles-Gil said.
When the winter holidays rolled around, each went back to their home country, a separation that brought them closer.
“After we spent the holidays apart, we realized more consciously the extent of the feelings we had for each other,” Ms. Robles-Gil said. “When we went back to New York, we had a conversation that was like, ‘OK, this is it.’”
In early fall 2023, Mr. Gupta moved back to India to focus on his career as a podcaster and content creator.
“I told myself that if my career works out, and I have what it takes to marry someone like her, I will marry her in two years,” he said.
About a year later, Ms. Robles-Gil returned to Mexico City. They dated long-distance, meeting every three months in different parts of the world.
“It gave so much character to this relationship,” Mr. Gupta said. “We’re still doing a lot of traveling separately. We’re both artistic in our drives. We find our own ways of being individually happy, so we can be collectively happy when we’re together.”
The two had been discussing the idea of marriage, and in September 2024, Mr. Gupta gave Ms. Robles-Gil an engagement ring while they were in New York for her solo exhibition at Artishouse in Manhattan, “Learning How to See.” Not long after, the couple traveled to Mexico City, where Mr. Gupta formally secured the approval of Ms. Robles-Gil’s parents.
They were married on Dec. 2 at Mr. Gupta’s family home in Faridabad in a ceremony led by Vijay Mishra and Govind Mishra, two Hindu priests, in front of about 300 guests. The next day, they held a reception for 1,500 people at the Tivoli, a hotel in New Delhi.
The week before the official ceremony, from Nov. 27 to Nov. 29, they organized three days of wedding celebrations at the JW Marriott Phuket Resort & Spa in Thailand. Many of the events combined elements of Indian and Mexican cultures. For example, one of the events was an “Indo-Mexican Mehendi Fiesta,” during which guests could have their skin painted with henna, mariachi music played, and tacos, tres leches cake and chilaquiles were served.
On Nov. 29, the couple’s friends, Elira Rodriguez and Parvir Sidhu, officiated a Western-style ceremony, where they exchanged vows.
“We had an altar with both of our faiths,” Ms. Robles-Gil said. “We had Krishna, Hanuman, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and a cross.”
For the reception that followed, they flew in one of their favorite British D.J.s, Paradox, to perform a set. After dancing for hours, Ms. Robles-Gil and Mr. Gupta joined friends on the beach with a speaker, where they greeted the sunrise together.
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