Gorick Ng waited nearly a decade for a date with Shuo Chen. When he finally got one, in 2021, circumstances prevented him from sweeping her off her feet like a hero in a romance novel. For the date they had arranged — bathing her grandfather — both needed their feet firmly on the ground.

Ms. Chen and Mr. Ng are entrepreneurs and teach a class together at the University of California, Berkeley. They were introduced over the phone in 2012 when both were undergraduates, Ms. Chen at Berkeley and Mr. Ng at Harvard. Ms. Chen, then 20, was still a year from finishing a bachelor’s degree but had already secured a job as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. Mr. Ng, also 20 at the time, wanted to work in banking, too. A friend from Toronto who had crossed paths with Ms. Chen in Bay Area investment circles suggested he reach out to ask her advice.

“It was one of those, ‘You should totally talk to so-and-so’ conversations,” Mr. Ng said. “I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’” In his eagerness to land a job right after college, he had already made dozens of “you should totally talk to” networking calls, he said. But his call with Ms. Chen, who chatted with him about interview strategies from his dorm room for more than an hour that fall, was different. “Oftentimes you do those kinds of calls and you forget everything that was said. This time, I remembered the person behind the call, how thoughtful and kind she was.”

When they met in person the following year at a group dinner arranged by friends at Ilili, a Manhattan restaurant, she reinforced that impression, but from too far across the room for Mr. Ng’s liking. Ms. Chen, then working for Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong, was visiting New York for training. Mr. Ng, who was working as an investment banking summer analyst at Credit Suisse’s New York headquarters, was seated at the opposite end of the table.

“I remember seeing her out of the corner of my eye, how she brought people into the conversation and how all the people surrounding her were laughing and having a good time,” he said. “I was thinking, Who placed me here and how can I get over there?”

For Mr. Ng, 30, wondering how to maneuver his way from a bad predicament into a better one felt familiar. Born in Toronto, he was raised as an only child by his mother, Mona Kwong, a factory seamstress who immigrated from Hong Kong to Canada in 1979 hoping to escape poverty. When he was 13, his parents divorced. His father, who also immigrated from Hong Kong, had been an infrequent presence at home, working at restaurants and casinos hours outside the city and returning only sporadically. “He kind of flowed in and out of my life, but mostly out,” he said.

Ms. Kwong, he said, “taught me everything I know.” Lesson No. 1 was to work hard. In 2005, shortly after his parents split, Ms. Kwong was laid off from her seamstress job. To help pay the bills, Mr. Ng cleaned houses with her on weekends. His domain was tubs and floors. “She did all the above-the-waist work, because bending over isn’t easy after you’ve spent a lifetime hunched over a sewing machine,” he said. Academic hard work and extracurricular hustle earned him full financial aid at Harvard.

Ms. Chen’s parents, James Chen and Wendy Pan, also immigrated to Canada, but from Beijing, where she was born and lived until the family left for Toronto in the late 1990s. Her maternal grandparents, who raised her while her parents worked long hours as producers on film and TV sets, came with them. Ms. Chen’s younger sister, Harriet, was born in Toronto. Three years later, the family settled in Vancouver. Better educational opportunities had brought them to Canada.

Ms. Chen is now 30. When she left for college, she was unsure about a career path. She had a triple major in business administration, economics and rhetoric, earning two bachelor’s degrees in 2013 while working part-time jobs to pay her tuition. She wasn’t done exploring her professional options when she signed on with Goldman Sachs in 2012. In 2015, she earned a law degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. A year later, she helped form the San Francisco venture capital firm IOVC, where she is still a general partner.

Meeting Mr. Ng in person at the 2013 group dinner didn’t leave her with the same sense of longing that he had felt. She had been impressed with him after the dorm room call the year before. But in person, she said, “we didn’t really get a chance to talk.”

Still, for years, from opposite coasts, they kept in touch. While Ms. Chen was starting IOVC in San Francisco, Mr. Ng, who graduated cum laude from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in government in 2014, worked as a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group. In 2016, he started an M.B.A. program at Harvard.

By the time he completed it in 2018, he had quietly accepted a conclusion drawn from years of talking with Ms. Chen long distance and occasionally seeing her when they were in the same city. “I was always thinking, You know, someone that kindhearted, thoughtful, generous, ambitious and pretty is way too good for me,” he said. Once, he had worked up enough courage to ask if she was seeing anyone. She was. “I thought, Duh. Of course she’s taken.”

Ms. Chen hadn’t realized part of the reason he kept in touch was an unrequited crush. “Some people get friend-zoned,” she said. “Gorick had a unique ability to get work zoned. The whole time he was reaching out to me, I thought it was about work.”

Binge more Vows columns here and read all our wedding, relationship and divorce coverage here.

The zone confusion began to clear in 2020, when Mr. Ng, who had returned to Harvard to work as a career adviser, sent an end-of-year personal update email to friends and mentors. He had written a book, “The Unspoken Rules: Secrets to Starting Your Career Off Right,” to help job seekers from underrepresented backgrounds find their way to leadership positions. The group email was both a news blast and a collective thank you.

“I was reflecting on all the people who helped me become the person I am, and everything I was grateful for,” he said. Ms. Chen, who was teaching an entrepreneurship class at Berkeley, wrote back. “I was excited to hear about the book,” she said. “I said, ‘Wow, my students really, really need this.’”

“The Unspoken Rules,” published in the spring of 2021, won Mr. Ng a flurry of publicity and a spot on The Wall Street Journal’s best-seller list at a time when Ms. Chen wasn’t feeling quite as fortunate. Her grandmother, Shao Chen, was diagnosed with blood cancer in 2019. The correspondence that picked up between Ms. Chen and Mr. Ng after the book announcement became a source of comfort.

“He was one of the first people I told about the situation I was going through,” said Ms. Chen, who became her grandmother’s full-time caretaker in 2020. Her grandfather, Ning Pan, 90, is in fragile health. Her father, who had traveled to China at the start of the pandemic, was under lockdown and unable to return home. Her mother had a spine condition that limited her mobility. And Harriet Chen was still in graduate school.

While Ms. Chen sat at her grandmother’s hospital bedside in Vancouver and worked remotely, she and Mr. Ng grew closer.

“The world I work in, venture capital, is male dominated and most of the people are much older. I wasn’t used to being vulnerable,” she said. But with Mr. Ng, her emotional barriers fell. When Ms. Chen’s grandmother died in September 2021, Mr. Ng was the first to send flowers. Two months later, he joined her on a business trip to Athens. She thought he was coming along as a friend. They returned a committed couple.

They still hadn’t had what either considered a real first date, though. That came the day they flew back from Athens, when Mr. Ng decided to use his return ticket to Vancouver instead of going home to Boston.

After her grandmother died, Ms. Chen continued to live in Vancouver to care for Mr. Pan. Mr. Ng wanted to show up for the kind of first date he knew she would find meaningful. The night of their return, he joined her at the tub to help with Mr. Pan’s bath. By the end of 2021, he had pulled up roots in Boston and moved in with Ms. Chen in Vancouver and San Francisco, where both still travel weekly to teach at Berkeley. He has since established himself as Mr. Pan’s nightly foot bather.

For Ms. Chen, the bath date was more evidence of a love she hadn’t thought possible. As a caregiver, “I had so many challenges,” she said. “I thought I would never have a relationship. Gorick supported me through it all.”

On Nov. 23, 2022, Ms. Chen and Mr. Ng got engaged at Iguazu Falls, in Brazil, during another work trip for Ms. Chen. On Dec. 22, they married in Mr. Pan’s living room. Nellie Cheng, a marriage commissioner for the province of British Columbia, officiated a traditional Chinese tea ceremony wedding.

Ms. Chen, in a red cap-sleeve top and black pants, and Mr. Ng, in a sweater a darker shade of red, decorated the room with red flowers, stuffed animals and other scarlet objects from around the house to set the scene for joy and good fortune per Chinese custom. Mr. Pan, in a red jacket, sat on the sofa. Harriet Chen, the only other in-person guest, served as a witness and photographer. To protect Mr. Pan’s health, Ms. Kwong and Ms. Chen’s parents and a few extended family members attended via Zoom.

As they exchanged vows in both English and Mandarin, Mr. Pan’s first language, the couple knelt before their on-screen parents to show their respect. Ms. Chen was overcome with emotion. “I bawled my eyes out,” she said. “I am so incredibly happy and grateful I found Gorick.”

On This Day

When Dec. 22, 2022

Where Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Outside the Work Zone Eric Hendey, Mr. Ng’s college roommate, said Ms. Chen and Mr. Ng’s professional accomplishments often grab attention, but their personal qualities are just as impressive. “From everything you see about them, they’re career gunners,” he said. “But these are two people who are really kind and caring.”

Tradition After their wedding ceremony, Ms. Chen and Mr. Ng found a Vancouver restaurant whose name included the word “qing,” which means “celebration” in Chinese, for take-out dinner. After his own wedding more than 60 years earlier in China, Mr. Pan and Ms. Chen’s grandmother had also gotten dinner from a “qing” restaurant.