After arriving at their friends’ nuptials in Burbank, Calif., on July 1, 2017, Dr. Vivian Esther Yee and Joshua Kent Ma, both members of the wedding party, soon found out that they would be paired together as bridesmaid and groomsman. The two, who had not met before, also learned that they were the wedding party’s only single members.

“Obviously we were set up,” Mr. Ma said.

Despite hitting it off enough that Dr. Yee, 36, said she had “a crush on” Mr. Ma, 34, after the event, she didn’t expect their spark to lead to a serious romance.

A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Ma at the time was a lieutenant in the Navy’s Civil Engineer Corps and living in Quantico, Va. Dr. Yee, who graduated from the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, was living in Los Angeles and working as a pediatric dentist.

Both native Californians — she was born in Burbank and grew up in Arcadia, while he was born in Pasadena and raised in San Gabriel — he would often return to the state to visit family and friends, including the couple at whose wedding they met. After bumping into each other on a few of his visits, the two and their friend group attended the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April 2018, a trip that would kick-start their relationship.

On their last day at Coachella, Dr. Yee shared a personal story with Mr. Ma. The year before, on Christmas Eve, she had witnessed someone suffer a seizure at a gas station, which made her “realize how unpredictable and fragile life is,” she said. In that moment, Mr. Ma said, “I felt like I was uncovering a window into Vivian’s soul.”

Later that day, he asked if he could take her on a date. Though she said yes, with no time to plan it before he returned to Virginia, that date didn’t come until Mr. Ma visited Los Angeles weeks later.

On that trip they went to Malibu, Calif., as well as to the Broad art museum in Los Angeles, and ate tacos. (“He loves tacos,” Dr. Yee said.) But before he left, wary of the distance between them, Mr. Ma told her he just wanted to be friends.

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In November 2018, Mr. Ma returned to Los Angeles for a wedding. While there, he and Dr. Yee spent time together as friends, seeing art exhibits, taking a workout class and, again, eating tacos. On his way to the airport for his flight home, it struck him that he wanted to be with her.

“I was making the biggest mistake if I didn’t try now,” he recalled thinking.

Weeks later, when Dr. Yee took a trip to New York to visit family in December, Mr. Ma met her in the city, where he confessed his feelings for her. In January 2019, he asked her to be his girlfriend. By February, she had agreed.

That April, Mr. Ma left the Navy and, in October 2019, moved in with his father in Los Angeles. He currently works remotely as a customer success engineer at Sysdig, a cybersecurity company in San Francisco. Dr. Yee works at Adventure Dental in Santa Clarita, Calif., and as an attending pediatric dentist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

Living in the same city, she said, meant that they “could finally do really normal things like see each other after work or watch Netflix together.”

The two became engaged in June 2021, during a trip to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. As they rode horses along a trail with what Mr. Ma described as a “beautiful overlook of the ravine of the canyon,” he proposed. “My heart was full,” Dr. Yee said.

On April 29, they held a wedding ceremony at Ole Hanson Beach Club in San Clemente, Calif., with 124 guests, all of whom were asked to show proof of vaccination or to take Covid tests before attending. It was led by Ahmad Woods, a friend of the groom, who signed their marriage license April 30 after being ordained a Universal Life Church minister.

Watching the bride approach the altar, Mr. Ma said, was a moment that will always be “very, very clear in my mind.”