The romantic potential between Sascha Feldman and Jacob Esocoff was evident to both of them (and several mutual friends) soon after they met in a literature seminar at Sarah Lawrence College in January 2008. But the two never spoke a word about it — to each other, at least — for more than six years.

Though it was only open to upperclassman, Ms. Feldman, a freshman at the time, had persuaded the professor to let her enroll in the seminar of about 15 students as an auditor. Mr. Esocoff, a senior, sat directly opposite her across an oval table.

“He was really handsome,” Ms. Feldman said of her first impression of him. “I remember him breaking into a huge smile when I caught his eye across the table.”

Attracted to her as well, Mr. Esocoff said their mutual friends soon “picked up on it and teased us relentlessly.”

But the only direct communication between the pair was during class discussions, where “he was actively listening when I spoke,” Ms. Feldman said.

“She lived off-campus,” Mr. Esocoff said, “So I wouldn’t see her around.”

“She was this mystery,” he added.

Following his graduation that spring, Mr. Esocoff, now 36, moved back to Washington, his hometown, to work for his parents, Amy Weinstein and Philip Esocoff, who are both architects. He later enrolled at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where he earned a master’s degree in architecture.

Over the years, he and Ms. Feldman would see one another occasionally at dinners hosted by mutual friends in New York City, as well as at get-togethers organized by their former seminar professor. Every time, friends would ask why they didn’t date one another.

“I just thought it was ridiculous,” Ms. Feldman, now 33, said. A Los Angeles native, after graduating from Sarah Lawrence, she received a master’s degree in curatorial studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

“A crush is usually unrequited,” she added. “A mutual crush felt too good to be true.”

But it was true, and by June 2014, Mr. Esocoff had finally built up the courage to ask her out. Despite all the encouragement from friends over the years, he was still nervous about how Ms. Feldman would answer.

“I was such a coward about it,” he said. “If she said no, I didn’t want it to get back to our friends.” To give himself “plausible deniability,” he concocted a plan to do so “in a circuitous way by asking a favor.”

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At the time, Ms. Feldman worked at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., a contemporary art gallery in New York. It represents the artist Kara Walker, whose installation, “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” had recently opened in the former Domino Sugar compound in Brooklyn.

Knowing that Ms. Walker’s exhibition, which featured a massive, sugarcoated sphinx-like woman, had started to draw long lines of people, Mr. Esocoff emailed Ms. Feldman to see if she could put him and his parents on a list that allowed them to avoid standing and waiting. She did.

On the day they attended, Mr. Esocoff’s father asked him who had gotten them in. When Mr. Esocoff told him it was Ms. Feldman, “something in the way I said her name” made his father reply, “‘Oh, she sounds interesting …’ like something is going on here,” he said.

A few days later, Mr. Esocoff emailed Ms. Feldman to thank her and asked if he could take her out for a drink to show his appreciation. That drink on June 21, 2014, at Schiller’s Liquor Bar in Lower Manhattan, would turn out to not only be their first date, but also the beginning of their life together.

“I’m like zero to 100. I don’t ask her out for seven years,” Mr. Esocoff said, “And then I’m like, ‘We’re a couple now, right?’”

“When I saw her for the first time, I thought I could marry her,” added Mr. Esocoff, who explained that when they met in college, he didn’t want to rush into anything. “I knew if we started talking it would be serious.”

About a year into their relationship, he moved into her apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where they still live today. Mr. Esocoff is now a principal at Ideas of Order in New York, an architecture firm he co-founded in 2021. Ms. Feldman is currently the director of James Cohan Gallery in New York.

She described their time living together since 2015 as a mixture of “merging family heirlooms from both sides, hosting lots of friends and family, buying too many books and slowly building an art collection.”

Ms. Feldman added that the couple has “grown very close to each other’s parents,” and that her mother and father, Susan Horowitz and Rick Feldman, have developed individual friendships with Mr. Esocoff’s parents “that exist independently from us.”

Coming from a family of architects and being one himself, Mr. Esocoff said he at first “had to come around to the idea of not marrying an architect.” But “when I thought about whether Sascha would be a good partner,” he added, “I figured, ‘Well, she deals with artists every day, so she must be able to put up with me.’ This proved to be correct in many ways.”

On Dec. 22, 2019, a few hours before the two were to board a flight to Rome, Mr. Esocoff asked Ms. Feldman to marry him at the TWA Hotel at John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens. He described his proposal — which he had plotted out a week earlier with the maître d’ at the hotel’s restaurant, Paris Café — as “an expression of love through design.”

“We decided on the perfect table,” he said, and that the maître d’ would deliver Ms. Feldman a wrapped box containing her engagement ring at the end of their meal “as if it was a present.”

But the box was actually a copy of “Designing TWA: Eero Saarinen’s Airport Terminal in New York,” a book about the history of the former TWA Flight Center, a designated city landmark, that became the hotel. “With a small X-acto knife, I hollowed out a square in the center” of the book “and inserted a piece of foam for the ring to sit in,” Mr. Esocoff said.

Using the TWA logo, he had also designed the paper it was wrapped in, as well as stationery on which he wrote a note “in the voice of” Mr. Saarinen, the building’s architect, “wishing us luck on our big adventure,” he added.

Although they had already chosen her engagement ring months before — an asymmetrical design with a champagne diamond flanked by a black diamond on one side and a white diamond on the other — Ms. Feldman said she could not have been more surprised.

“I was dead, I was deceased,” she said. “There’s nothing I love more than books. I didn’t want anything performative. It just felt so correct.”

On April 9, the couple returned to the TWA Hotel for their wedding, at which Sophia Chitlik Abram, a friend of Ms. Feldman’s for more than 20 years who was ordained by American Marriage Ministries for the occasion, officiated before 110 vaccinated guests.

They chose the venue for several reasons. In addition to being where they became engaged, Ms. Feldman said, “It honors three generations of Jake’s family — Jake, his mother, his father and his maternal grandfather,” who all were or are architects. Further, she added, “It is a building that acts as a once and now metaphorical entry to New York.”

The ceremony took place in the hotel’s Sunken Lounge beneath a restored Solari board from the building’s days as a terminal, which the couple had customized to display “places we have traveled to together, where we hope to go in the future, our shared family trajectory, Odessa to Lower East Side, and at the top our birth place and birth dates,” Ms. Feldman said.

Though the ceremony incorporated Jewish traditions, the couple did not have a free-standing huppah. “We felt it would be hubristic to design a huppah, itself a piece of architecture,” within the building, Mr. Esocoff said. Instead, their parents held above them a tablecloth from the 1930s that had been embroidered by Mr. Esocoff’s maternal great-grandmother, Ida Price.

This setup, he explained, “met the, albeit loosened, requirements of a huppah for a Jewish wedding, and highlighted our parents, who are pillars in our lives.”

Following the ceremony came a cocktail hour in the hotel’s Ambassadors Club and then a reception in the 1962 Room, one of its two ballrooms. The reception began with the hora and later featured a “dance off,” the groom said, between him and some friends who would street dance in high school.

Dance, he added, is a creative outlet, “and it happens to be a great way to meet girls if you’re not great at sports.”

On This Day

When April 9, 2022

Where TWA Hotel, Queens.

Women Supporting Women “It was important to me to support and collaborate with small businesses founded and run by women of my generation,” Ms. Feldman said. “The wedding planner, florist and photographer are all women in their 30s who are running their own businesses in very challenging times.”

Double Take Before the ceremony, the couple did a full run through that included reading their vows. “That’s the most important part of the day, and it flies by,” Ms. Feldman said. “I’m so glad we did because I would have missed it if I hadn’t heard it before.”

Rave Reviews The day after the wedding, Charley Moss and Ann Cook, close friends of Ms. Feldman’s parents’, sent them an effusive email that was passed along to the newlyweds. It read, “Last night was a smashing success … it was warm but not corny, humorous but not frivolous, love-filled but not forced, elegant but not gaudy and welcoming to all with joy and happiness.”