We first met in the summer of 2015, a few days after Sonia started working at Google. Sonia was having dinner at a Google cafe with a group of Nooglers (new Googlers) who had started work the same day as her. Zach saw one of his college friends at Sonia’s table and joined them. Sonia fondly recalls how sociable Zach was during this meeting. We continued to meet through mutual friend circles and became friends over the next few months. Zach encouraged Sonia to host Fast & Furious movie nights at her apartment’s theater room and attended all of them.

We went on our first date on April 28, 2016 when Zach promised to make a salad that Sonia would enjoy (Sonia doesn’t appreciate the more leafy foods). Zach served up a delicious bread-based panzanella salad, which resonated with Sonia’s love of carbs. Zach is still cooking yummy foods for us to this day.

Over the next few years, we went through life’s adventures that ultimately brought us closer. Sonia would plan fun date night excursions and Zach, living in Mountain View, would often do the 4-hour bike ride to visit Sonia in her San Francisco apartment. We shared songs, often going to concerts together. We learned from and about one another. As Zach put it: we grew older, and we only grew more compatible.

Sonia’s keenness for travel brought us around the globe over the years. From small coastal trips to Portland or LA, to medium jaunts to Boston, Austin, or Philadelphia, to cross-oceanic journeys to India, London, or Bucharest, Zach and Sonia have seen it together. Sonia always brought an excited and knowledgeable vision to their travels that opened up Zach to the joy that sightseeing could yield.

We moved in together on February 1, 2020. One month later, we were quarantining along with the rest of the globe as covid triggered work from home and limited in-person contact. During this time, we watched movies (thanks Netflix DVDs) and played tons of video games. Unlike many couples not used to spending so much time together, we found that we enjoyed each other’s constant companionship very much.

As the pandemic continued with no end in sight, we decided to pod up with family by renting an Airbnb for the 2020 holidays in the DC area, close to our families. We thought this would be a “temporary situation,” but we greatly liked living on the East Coast. With our Mountain View lease up and enduring work-from-home, we decided to move to Arlington, VA in January 2021. We flew back to California to pack up all our belongings into XL Home Depot boxes and then Fedex’ed them to ourselves, selling and donating everything too big to transport by cardboard box. This gave us a fresh start with which to build our home and pick out furniture items together.

We both changed jobs in the summer of 2021, with Sonia joining another team in Google in DC and Zach joining a startup, Rivos, founded by his former Google director. We visited India in the spring of 2022, where we learned that Zach has a much better heat tolerance (for both temperature and spicy foods) than Sonia does. The weekend we returned to the US we found a wonderful house in our ideal neighborhood on the market and put in our offer, which was accepted, consummating our DC move.

We’ve known for quite some time that we wanted to be life partners and are delighted to celebrate that occasion this year. We will have a traditional Indian ceremony with family and friends in Mumbai in February. On April 29, 2023 - 7 years and one day after our first date - we will have a ceremony and reception in DC. We hope you will be able to join and celebrate with us!