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Vows

By TAMMY La GORCE

If Geneviève DeBose were something other than a seventh- and eighth-grade English teacher, she might have been less dismissive of the all-too-brief message she received from Tosin Akinnagbe via OkCupid in September 2015.

In her job at the Bronx Studio School for Writers and Artists, she sometimes has to coax students struggling with writer’s block to jot down more than the bare minimum in their assignments.

Perhaps Mr. Akinnagbe needed such a teacher, too, for here is the entirety of his OkCupid message (not counting emoji of a smiley face and a shooting star): “There is just so damn much I appreciate and smiled about while reading your profile.”

Shakespeare he isn’t, and Ms. DeBose, 39, of Harlem, was thoroughly unimpressed.

“The way I perceived it, he didn’t try very hard,” she said.

But then, while scoring student papers a week later, she remembered that Mr. Akinnagbe had actually included more than just that brief sentence. In response to a request for musical recommendations that she had made of all her would-be suitors, he had attached two songs.

“I like to listen to music when I’m working on papers,” she said. “So I said to myself, ‘What did this guy send me?’”

She listened. First to “The Raft,” by Fat Freddy’s Drop, a New Zealand band, and then to the Malian artist Salif Keita’s “Laban.”

“I listened a long time, like more than an hour,” said Ms. DeBose, whose assessment of Mr. Akinnagbe rose from something like a D-minus to a respectable B as she played the songs: “These were both solid artists I had never heard before. I said, ‘Let me take another look at this guy.’”

What she found was a 36-year-old Nigerian-American who shared her passions of food and travel, who felt his cultural heritage deeply and who was growing disillusioned with looking for love online.

“The reason I had sent her only a very brief message on OkCupid was because I had already been through multiple dating sites, like Match and HowAboutWe and Tinder, since my friends put me onto online dating in 2011 or 2012,” said Mr. Akinnagbe, who moved to New York from Maryland three years ago to pursue an information-technology job. (He is now pursuing a communications degree through the University of Maryland’s online program.)

His full name is as voluminous as his writing is brief: Toluwalope Oluwatosin Enilolobo Akinnagbe. Friends call him Tosi or Tosin.

Mr. Akinnagbe had been on the verge of dismantling his dating profile when he heard from Ms. DeBose, who moved to New York from California in 2006.

“I kept finding the same thing, which was no authenticity, no transparency,” he said. “So when I wrote to Geneviève, I was like: ‘I’m going to burn this house down. I don’t care anymore.’ She was my last try.”

He made a point of going out on a note of personal integrity: “I chose those two songs because I wanted to share something I truly enjoyed instead of trying to impress her.” The Fat Freddy’s Drop tune is upbeat with shades of bossa nova, he said. Mr. Keita’s song he described as “just chill.”

He had shared enough to affect Ms. DeBose, and that isn’t easy.

Naima Beckles, a friend and former teacher whom Ms. DeBose had met in 1999 while working with Teach for America, described her friend as a “firecracker” who’ll finish in 12 hours what most people need a week to do.

Besides her teaching duties, Ms. DeBose serves as a commissioner on the National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future, as a Teaching Channel laureate and as an advisory board member of the Black Teacher Project, which recruits and supports black teachers.

After a few weeks of correspondence via OkCupid, Mr. Akinnagbe and Ms. DeBose met face to face for the first time over the Columbus Day weekend last year.

The site of that first date was Mr. Akinnagbe’s workplace, Bloomberg L.P. in Midtown Manhattan, where he is on the 3 p.m.-to-midnight shift as an internal information technology specialist.

It was Sunday night, and he took advantage of the evening quiet around the office to orchestrate an intimate night, including a conference-room table spread with a white tablecloth, flowers and takeout Thai food. Sade played from his iPhone.

(Mr. Akinnagbe explained that there was no conflict with his work duties, that their date was contained to his dinner break.) “My job sends me all over the building, so I was able to give her a tour as I worked,” he said. “There were also a few times when I left Geneviève to herself to attend to work.”

Ms. DeBose didn’t mind the worksite location for their first date: “We talked about our passion for food and drink, our love of travel. He had to leave a couple of times to go do work things, but it didn’t matter because the conversation was so good.”

At 2:30 a.m., she was climbing into a cab home when Mr. Akinnagbe asked if she wanted to have breakfast. At 10 a.m., they met for a picnic at St. Nicholas Park in Upper Manhattan.

By the end of that date, they were sure that something meaningful was brewing.

They began taking trips together, short ones at first, to Cold Spring and Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., last fall. Then they began carving out time for more ambitious travel. For a New Year’s trip, they ventured to Montreal. While there, via text, Mr. Akinnagbe confided to Jenna Ryerson, a friend from his days as a University of Maryland student in the late 1990s, that he had found the woman he wanted to marry.

Ms. Ryerson said: “I knew he had met her in October, and by that day in December he texted me he was already telling me, ‘I’m getting married.’ But I would expect nothing less from Tosin than a whirlwind courtship. He’s not traditional. He does things his own way.”

In February, the couple visited Hawaii, where Ms. DeBose got acquainted with Mr. Akinnagbe’s sense of fearlessness.

“Rides along the curvy, narrow roads on the northwest coast of Maui in the dark proved to be stressful for me and completely fine for Tosi,” she said. They bonded over the thrills (for him) and terror (for her): “Those rides led to conversations about risk, safety, anxiety and family histories.”

In April, they journeyed to Amsterdam. On previous trips, they had jointly developed the itineraries; this time, Mr. Akinnagbe was in charge.

“I would ask what kind of clothes I needed to wear that day and go through the day not knowing what would happen next,” Ms. DeBose said. “For an accomplished and independent professional woman who is used to doing most things herself, it was refreshing to be in the passenger seat.”

That trip included a private Black Heritage of Amsterdam tour, a Cirque du Soleil show and cruises along Amsterdam’s canals. On April 25, they took a flight to Paris and made their way to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Before they left Amsterdam, Mr. Akinnagbe had tucked into his pocket a simple but delicate gold ring with a citrine stone, bought at Bloomingdale’s in New York.

Ms. DeBose said: “We had already walked around the top of the Eiffel Tower once, and I was freezing. I was like: ‘Good, we did it. Is this enough?’ He said, ‘Hold on, I want to walk around one more time.’”

After finding the most wind-free Eiffel Tower nook possible, Ms. DeBose enlisted a fellow tourist to take their picture. When she turned back around, she found Mr. Akinnagbe on one knee with the ring.

“There are pictures of us laughing, pictures of us kissing,” Ms. DeBose said. “The whole scene was captured.”

On Oct. 9, a raw and rainy Sunday, Mr. Akinnagbe and Ms. DeBose welcomed 180 friends and relatives to the International House, a nonprofit residence for scholars and graduate students in Upper Manhattan.

Ms. DeBose’s mixed-race heritage — her mother, Maureen DeBose, is Irish, and her father, Dr. Herbert DeBose, is African-American — factored into the ceremony, at which Ms. Beckles officiated, as did Mr. Akinnagbe’s Nigerian-American heritage.

As he walked down the aisle, Mr. Akinnagbe, dressed in a black suit with a red-patterned vest made of traditional Nigerian fabric, pumped his fists while a looped recording of “The Champion Is Here,” used to introduce his hero Muhammad Ali before prizefights, rumbled through the auditorium’s sound system.

Minutes later, Ms. DeBose, in sparkly low heels and a long white fitted gown from Anthropologie that she and a friend called “the sexy mermaid dress,” was escorted down the aisle by her mother and father. Mohamed Soumah, a friend from Oakland, Calif., known as Tiger, pounded out ceremonial beats on an African djembe drum; those beats were combined with a “Riverdance”-like recording of traditional Irish music.

On a raised stage with Ms. DeBose and Mr. Akinnagbe were their attendants: two matrons of honor, four bridesmaids and a bridesman stood behind Ms. DeBose, and two best men and a groomsman and groomswoman — Ms. Ryerson — flanked Mr. Akinnagbe.

After the ceremony, Maureen DeBose admitted that, being of “the old generation,” she had not been sure about her daughter finding her husband via internet dating.

“But Geneviève is happier than she’s ever been,” she said. “All I can say is they have my blessing.”