Guess where this photo was taken was the prompt John Sasscer Sanders Jr. gave alongside a photo on his Hinge dating profile. The image captured Mr. Sanders at a book-signing event for the sociologist Matthew Desmond during the 2023 National Book Festival in Washington. Shannon Shiyi Wu had volunteered at the festival that year, and was familiar with Mr. Desmond’s work. So when Mr. Sanders liked one of her profile photos in September 2023, Ms. Wu checked out his profile and saw the photo from the festival. “I know exactly where that is,” she responded. “That book is ‘Poverty, by America.’” They chatted about how Ms. Wu had read Mr. Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Evicted,” and visited the exhibit it inspired at the National Building Museum in 2018. It was the first of many shared interests for the couple. Their first date, days after they matched on Hinge, however, got off to a rough start when Mr. Sanders went to the wrong location of the coffee shop where they had agreed to meet. Once they pieced together the snafu and found each other 30 minutes later, the conversation flowed easily. She was “very easy to talk to, very engaging and fun,” Mr. Sanders said. “I thought she had a wonderful, distinctive laugh.” Ms. Wu, 33, is the director of payment policy at the American Hospital Association. Mr. Sanders, 37, is the senior manager of technical accounting at International Game Technology, a company that provides products and services for lotteries and casinos. Their next dates through the fall of 2023 were a series of thoughtful pursuits, such as seeing a comedy show, trying Peruvian food, visiting the Rothko exhibition at the National Art Gallery, and dining at the Dabney, a Michelin-star restaurant in Washington. It was on their first weekend away together that December, when Mr. Sanders invited her to his family home on the eastern shore of Maryland, that Ms. Wu realized their relationship had real promise. In November 2024, just over a year after they met, Mr. Sanders proposed to Ms. Wu near the Touchstone Gallery in downtown Washington. Their wedding on Feb. 28 was low-key, with just their parents and Mr. Sanders’s brothers and toddler nephew. They married at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in a ceremony officiated by George Barbour, the branch chief of the marriage bureau.
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