Abigail Sommers and Forrest Gray met in January 2015 when both joined Delta Kappa Alpha, an organization at the University of Southern California for students interested in the cinematic arts. The two pledged by participating in challenging group activities, like making a Wes Anderson-style horror film in 24 hours or wearing a beret continuously for a semester. “They said you could only take the beret off for the three S’s — sleep, sex and shower,” Mr. Gray said.

Ms. Sommers was an undergraduate majoring in cinema and media studies at the university. Mr. Gray had recently graduated from the Berklee College of Music in Boston and was pursuing a graduate certificate in scoring for motion pictures and television, a one-year program he completed that spring.

He remembers being “immediately taken” by Ms. Sommers’s large, almond-colored eyes and dark sense of humor. “Her bubbly appearance belied an inner sardonic quality,” he said.

Mr. Gray, 31, spent his childhood in Sag Harbor, N.Y., in a family of creative people, which included his father, Spalding Gray, a monologuist and actor who died in 2004. It was not a religious household. When he was 10, the younger Mr. Gray declared he did not believe in God.

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Ms. Sommers, who is 29 and known as Abi, grew up in Santa Clarita, Calif., in a more conservative environment. Her father, David Sommers, is a driver on film and television sets in Los Angeles; her mother, Michelle Sommers, is a retired special education teacher. Ms. Sommers attended a Christian high school and was often advised against dating a non-Christian on the premise that one person in the relationship would probably end up converting the other. “It’s called ‘missionary dating,’” she said.

Mr. Gray’s mother, Kathie Russo, a podcast producer in Sag Harbor, described the couple’s different backgrounds this way: “Abi went to a conservative high school where they bought a commemorative birthday cake for Ronald Reagan every year. Forrest went to the Ross School in East Hampton, where there was once a debate about the artistic merits of a U.S. flag affixed with dildos.”