Before Brittney Adjei Adu switched high schools in 2014, she was so distracted by her crush on Aaron Notowich Canales that her chemistry grade was slipping. “I was scarily obsessed with him,” said Ms. Adu, who once counted 125 freckles on his right cheek while staring at him in class.

Ms. Adu and Mr. Canales, both 26, met on their first day as freshmen at Ridgeway High School in Memphis in 2010, when they were 13. Before the morning bell, she spotted him in the school parking lot and pointed him out to Shannon Little, her best friend since elementary school. “I said, ‘Oh my God, this guy is so cute,’” she said. “I was like, ‘I love high school!’”

When he took the seat next to hers in homeroom, she loved it more. “I was writing in my diary every day about him and reading my teen magazines for stuff like what to wear to make a guy like you,” she said.

Perfect skinny jeans might not have done a lot to reconcile the differences in their backgrounds, though. Ms. Adu is Black and was raised Southern Baptist in Memphis, the only child of a single mother, Betty Curtis. Mr. Canales, also a Memphis native, is mixed race and grew up with a younger brother in a conservative Jewish household with his Polish mother, Stacy Canales, and, until he was 9, his Mexican American father, Arturo Canales. The elder Mr. Canales now lives in Virginia, where he works for the federal government.

Though both were in classes for academically talented students, Ms. Adu and Mr. Canales sat on different sides of the teenage social spectrum, too. “I had behavioral problems, defiance kind of stuff,” Mr. Canales said. “I was a wild card.” Ms. Adu was an extra-credit queen with good conduct. “I had lots of friends,” she said. “I was very well liked by my teachers, and I had external validation all the time.”

Much of this validation came from her mother. Ms. Curtis, a former special education teacher, had her daughter at age 40. “Only children of older parents tend to get looped into this adult way of life,” Ms. Adu said.

She grew up attending jazz performances and lectures. When she misbehaved, her mother sat her down over decaf coffee. “Instead of being grounded or punished, she would say, ‘What you did yesterday was not cool,’” Ms. Adu said. “I’m more strict on myself than my mom has ever been.” As childhoods go, she said, hers was a good one.

Mr. Canales’s childhood wasn’t as idyllic. That first year of high school, “there was friction at home,” he said. Looking back, he thinks he was suffering from depression but was unable to express it.

Had he not been oblivious to Ms. Adu’s crush, he might not have waited until she left Ridgeway High to tell her that he, too, wanted to be more than study buddies. “I thought she was really attractive,” he said. “I thought someone with her vivacious personality and friends all around her would never date me.”

In 2012, after sophomore year, Ms. Adu transferred to Houston High School, about 20 minutes away from Ridgeway, in Germantown, Tenn. Her mother had heard good things about the school’s honors and advanced-placement programs, and Ms. Adu was ready for a challenge.

Also, getting away from Mr. Canales, who had become a close friend, seemed a good idea academically. For better access to his table in chemistry class, she had intentionally botched assignments; students who were underperforming sat closer to the teacher’s desk.

Ms. Adu and Mr. Canales never lost touch after her transfer and were texting daily. In the spring of 2013, she told him she had been asked to junior prom. “He was like, ‘That’s not happening,’” she said. In the same text exchange, he asked her to be his girlfriend. Ms. Adu has no trouble recalling the date: “It was April 7, 2013. I screamed. I put the phone down and ran laps around my house. I felt like I was president of the entire world. I said, ‘I’d love to be your girlfriend.’”

Their first date, a few weeks later, was a “Percy Jackson” movie. Ms. Curtis, who had raised her daughter to embrace cultural differences, liked Mr. Canales immediately. Mr. Canales’s family approved of Ms. Adu right away, too. “My parents had told me in no uncertain terms they wanted me marrying a Jewish girl,” he said. But given his struggles at home, “they were just happy Brittney was a normal person.”

At the end of his junior year in 2013, Mr. Canales had graduated high school. “I wanted out,” he said, so he took summer classes and enrolled at the University of Memphis as a 16 year old. In 2014, when Ms. Adu graduated, she followed him there, despite acceptances to other colleges. “If I didn’t love him so much, I would have been like, ‘Why didn’t I go to Maine or Minnesota or other places I had gotten into?’” she said. “But I think our relationship is worth more than a degree from anyplace.”

Regardless, in the summer of 2016 while in college, they broke up. “I was slipping into some old habits that were representative of immaturity,” Mr. Canales said. Recreational drug use had caused him legal trouble. “I felt like, if I continue this, I’ll ruin it, so I better let her go. I was figuring out who I was and hoping she would find someone less chaotic.”

After nearly a year with limited contact, he texted her during her shift at Muddy’s Bake Shop in Memphis in the fall of 2017. She had been “talking to” someone else and, she said, “things were starting to get a little more meaningful.” But when she read a text from Mr. Canales on a break from ringing up cupcakes, her first thought was, “I can never talk to that guy again.” Mr. Canales wrote that he still had feelings for her. “Within the first few months of the breakup, I was like, ‘God, I’ve screwed up,’” he said. “I said, ‘I think I still love you.’”

He hadn’t crafted that text without a healthy dose of self-scrutiny. “I’ve asked myself, was that a selfish thing to do?” he said. “Yes, it was. But was it a good decision? Absolutely it was.”

Mr. Canales graduated from the University of Memphis twice. In 2018, he finished a bachelor’s degree in psychology. In 2019, he earned another, in business administration. He expects to complete an M.B.A. at the university in 2024 and currently works as a compensation analyst at MAA, a Memphis real estate company. Ms. Adu graduated in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and is the communications director of Memphis Brand, a nonprofit organization that promotes Memphis through local stories.

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Both say their college breakup brought them closer. “Ultimately, it was a reminder for me of how special Britt is, of how wonderful life could be with her,” Mr. Canales said. When he proposed on Oct. 13, 2019, on a trip to New Orleans, both were ready to commit to a lifetime together. “Seven years had passed of us being in each other’s lives romantically,” Ms. Adu said. “We were still learning about each other, still growing together.”

Neither was ready when Ms. Adu’s mother started showing signs of memory loss at the end of 2019. A late bill notice that surfaced in the apartment that Ms. Adu shared with her mother tipped her off. “For Mom, that never would have happened,” said Ms. Adu. “She never forgot anything.”

Ms. Curtis is currently under the care of a neurologist; her condition has not yet been officially diagnosed. But by the time the pandemic arrived, “things were noticeably bad,” Ms. Adu said. Piecing together a wedding without her mother’s full involvement had, for years, been unthinkable. “We had planned this time in my life since childhood.”

Ms. Adu and Mr. Canales moved in together in November 2021, to a duplex in Memphis close enough to Ms. Curtis to allow for daily check-ins. Months earlier, Ms. Adu began converting to Judaism through American Jewish University, an online program, and with the help of Sarit Horwitz, a Memphis rabbi.

Mr. Canales’s family no longer expected him to marry a Jewish woman. But, Ms. Adu said, converting was “one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made, and something I did solely for me, which makes it even more special.”

Spending Jewish holidays with the Canales family, and her exposure to Jewish culture at the University of Memphis, where Mr. Canales was president of the Jewish student union, were catalysts. “I love the traditions, and everyone was so welcoming,” she said.

On Aug. 26, her 26th birthday, Ms. Adu was immersed in a mikvah, or traditional Jewish bath, among the last steps of her conversion process. Now, she said, “I am a Jewish woman.”

Ms. Adu and Mr. Canales wed a few weeks later, on Sept. 17, though not at a synagogue. They were married before 140 mostly vaccinated guests at the Lichterman Nature Center in Memphis. Ms. Adu chose the spot nearly a decade earlier. “The woods back up to Ridgeway High School,” she said. “I used to tell my friends, ‘I’m going to marry Aaron over there, it’s so pretty.’”

Ms. Adu, in a full-length ivory dress embroidered with flowers, walked down a woodsy aisle on the arms of her two “people of honor,” Ms. Little, her friend since elementary school, and another best friend, Allison Crone. She had planned to be escorted by her mother. “Mom had a bad day,” she said. “I realized it was just important that she was there.”

Mr. Canales, in a tuxedo, awaited them at a huppah decorated with greens and white flowers. Judge Sheryl H. Lipman of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee and a longtime Canales family friend, officiated.

In handwritten vows, Ms. Adu expressed gratitude. “I have the rest of my life to thank you for everything you’ve given me and remind you how special, loved and appreciated you are,” she said. Mr. Canales vowed to be unafraid to “dream big” with Ms. Adu.

When Judge Lipman pronounced them married, they stomped a glass to mark the start of their life together as husband and wife, a Jewish tradition.

Ms. Adu felt like president of the world a second time. “It was the most poignant moment of my life,” she said.

On This Day

When Sept. 17, 2022

Where The Lichterman Nature Center, Memphis

Making New Memories At a reception also held at the nature center, Ms. Adu and her mother had planned to dance to “A Mother’s Prayer,” by Celine Dion. “All through my childhood she always told me, ‘Me and you are going to dance at your wedding,’” Ms. Adu said. It didn’t happen. Instead, Ms. Adu danced with Mr. Canales Sr., while Mr. Canales danced with his mother. “It took a toll on my thoughts throughout the night,” she said. “She would be devastated if she knew she wasn’t able to do it.” But “she’s still the same sweet person I had my entire life. Things change.”

BFFs The ninth-grade friend Ms. Adu nudged when she first saw Mr. Canales in 2010, Ms. Little, was ultimately unsurprised that the couple married a dozen years later. “Anyone who knows Brittney knows how determined she is,” Ms. Little said. “When she told me Aaron was ‘the one,’ I knew she was going to make it happen.”