When ‘the Academic Girl’ Meets ‘the Popular Guy’

Kimberly Ann Alexander’s friends had urged her to do some fine-tuning of her Hinge profile when she joined in May 2020. “I kept getting pushback, like, ‘That’s not going to help you get to know anyone,’” she said.

Of particular concern was her answer to the prompt “name a random fact you love.” Instead of something flirty, Dr. Alexander, a clinical psychologist who was new to Hinge but experimenting at the onset of the pandemic, led with a fact that spoke to her as a scientist. “You can’t actually multitask,” she wrote. “Your brain has to switch back and forth.”

When Oladipo Akinkunmi Fatade read that answer while browsing Hinge two months later, he resisted the urge to multitask and paid attention. “It gave me a window into her personality,” he said. For him, the fact’s randomness, combined with her lighthearted answers to other prompts, spelled jackpot. “She was gorgeous, and it seemed like she didn’t take herself too seriously. I was like, ‘That’s the girl for me.’”

Dr. Alexander wasn’t sure, however, that he was the guy for her when they met for a first date on June 28, 2020, at Bryant Park in Manhattan.

Dr. Alexander, 35, practices psychology in the Mood Disorders Center at Manhattan’s Child Mind Institute. Mr. Fatade, also 35, writes creative copy for the concept and design studio team at Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max app. Both are first-generation Americans. Dr. Alexander’s family is Trinidadian; Mr. Fatade’s, Nigerian. But it was the potential for a social, not a cultural, mismatch that concerned Dr. Alexander when he came striding toward her in the park that summer.

“He seemed so cool and chill, like the popular guy in high school,” Dr. Alexander said. As such, he was not relatable. “I was definitely the academic girl with her head in the books.” Before they shared a picnic lunch he had planned, she had to rummage through her psychological toolbox to dispel a bout of paranoia.

Though he had shown up for the date, his dash to Panera Bread to pick up sandwiches just after introducing himself left her wondering if he would return. “I went through a lot of deductive reasoning,” she said, to convince herself that Mr. Fatade hadn’t made a spur-of-the-moment decision to ghost her. The picnic blanket he left with her became a temporary security blanket.

“It seemed nice, like something of quality,” she said. “I thought, he probably wouldn’t leave that behind.” But he wouldn’t have left her, either. Just seeing her in her first-date outfit — an oversize pinstripe shirt, biker shorts and chunky socks in white sneakers — he was already halfway in love, he said. “She seemed so casual and cool. I thought, this day is going to go well.”

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Mr. Fatade, a self-described extrovert whose nickname, Ladi, rhymes with his last name, was born in Manhattan but spent his childhood in his parents’ native Lagos with an older sister, Abisola Fatade. His parents, Isaac Akin Fatade and Aderonke Fatade, divorced in 2016; he has three younger half-siblings on his father’s side. As an adolescent, he went to a British boarding school in Togo, then returned to the United States to attend Emory University, where he graduated in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in political science.

Three years later, he completed a copywriting program at Miami Ad School in Atlanta. The same year, he moved to Manhattan to live with Abisola, now an assistant counsel at the office at the New York State attorney general.

Dr. Alexander’s parents, Israel and Molly Alexander, emigrated from Trinidad and Tobago in the 1970s. They settled in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with her two older brothers, then moved to Queens Village. The family still live in her childhood home. “I love that house,” she said. “It’s been the pillar of my family.”

Until she moved in with Mr. Fatade in 2022, she had never lived anywhere else, with the exception of a dorm room at Stony Brook University, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 2009. In 2020, she completed a doctoral degree in psychology at St. John’s University. She and Mr. Fatade live in Long Island City now; most Sundays, they visit her parents for a traditional Trinidadian dinner, often featuring the stews and curries she learned to make as a child.

Mr. Fatade’s prediction that their first date would go well was spot on. After their picnic lunch, they strolled around Manhattan for hours. Dr. Alexander felt herself falling for him and had to convince herself to pump the brakes. “I had it in the back of my mind that this was a first date, and I need to temper things,” she said.

Within weeks, though, all tempering bets were off. In late July, on another walk in Manhattan, they agreed to delete Hinge from their phones simultaneously. “There was no hesitation,” Dr. Alexander said. On the way to her train home, their phones each one app lighter, “we just looked at each other like, ‘Oh my God, we’re together,’” she said.

They have been ever since, at one point uncomfortably so. At the end of 2020, both contracted Covid on the plane ride home from a Christmas vacation to Panama with Mr. Fatade’s mother. While they quarantined together at Mr. Fatade’s Midtown apartment in January 2021, a beloved aunt of Dr. Alexander’s, Polly Chattun, died. “That was one of the more trying times in our dating phase,” Dr. Alexander said.

Though Mr. Fatade came through with the support that helped her grieve, her family felt her absence. “My dad really wanted to go to Ladi’s apartment and bring me home,” she said. “There was stress and worry at that time.”

She felt additional tension until later that year, in December, when she passed a psychology licensing exam after months of studying. “It’s well known in the field of psychology what a stressor the exam can be,” she said. “Ladi saw the full range of my emotional wheelhouse, and he rode that wave with me.”

By then, he was ready to ride whatever wave came next. “Kim makes me laugh so hard sometimes I roll on the ground,” he said. “And she wanted all the same things out of life I did. There were so many boxes that were checked with her.”

When Dr. Alexander and Mr. Fatade moved to their apartment in Long Island City in April 2022, he already knew he wanted to propose.

“My parents are not fans of living together before marriage,” Dr. Alexander said.

Mr. Fatade helped reassure them that summer on a visit to Queens Village. While Dr. Alexander was in the front yard bathing Cosmo, the family dog, he asked for their blessing to marry her. “I knew her parents were apprehensive about us living together,” he said. Huddling with them to confide his level of commitment soothed them and delivered a sense of security.

Dr. Alexander still has trouble believing her parents were able to hide their excitement. “I honestly didn’t think they would be able to keep it from me,” she said. “We’re so close and enmeshed — I always know what they know.”

On Sept. 2, 2022, after a visit to an art exhibition at the New York Public Library with Mr. Fatade’s sister, who had been recruited to snap pictures, he dropped to one knee in Bryant Park and presented Dr. Alexander with a diamond engagement ring. “I was overwhelmed by shock and surprise,” Dr. Alexander said. Her joyous “yes” was preceded by a more profane version of “Oh, wow.”

“I had no tears, but I had curses,” she said. “I’m definitely not the classic bride.”

Dr. Alexander and Mr. Fatade were married July 28 at Mr. Fatade’s family church in Manhattan, St. Bartholomew’s, where the Rev. Peter D. Thompson officiated a traditional Episcopalian wedding for 86 guests. For that occasion, Dr. Alexander was a classic American bride: In her white column wedding dress by the designer Sarah Seven, she walked down a narrow aisle clutching a bouquet of white flowers, escorted by her father. When they were pronounced married, “we lifted up each other’s hands like we had won something,” she said.

Two days later, with 160 guests in attendance, they had a traditional Nigerian wedding ceremony at the Foundry, an events space in Long Island City. The bride and groom and their families wore colorful Nigerian wedding clothes and headpieces sourced from Africa, some of it designed by Anu Oye in Brooklyn. Anita Clegg, an alaga, or wedding M.C., officiated a ceremony that, by the time it wrapped, had included hours of celebratory dancing with friends and extended family.

Monica Shah was Dr. Alexander’s maid of honor at both events. The love that hovered over the couple at each moved and enchanted her. “They’re two very committed people,” said Dr. Shah, also a psychologist. “At both ceremonies, you could feel how much they love each other.”

On This Day

When July 28, 2023

Where St. Bartholomew’s Church, Manhattan

Two Looks “It’s hard to pick which I loved more,” Dr. Alexander said of her two wedding ceremonies. Her white gown and her blue and gold outfit for the Nigerian wedding had what she called different personalities. But at the Foundry, “our colors were stunning. And I still looked like me.”

Global Roots Mr. Fatade’s parents have been moving between the United States and Nigeria for decades. His father, a venture capitalist, now splits his time between Atlanta and Nigeria. His mother moved to North Bergen, N.J., just before the couple met in 2020. Dr. Alexander’s parents are both retired and, in addition to hosting Sunday dinners, spend time at home with their two grandsons.

Custom Blend For both families, a church wedding was important. At the Episcopalian wedding, the couple wove Trinidadian flourishes into a reception at the church, including soca music. At the Nigerian ceremony, they served a Caribbean fusion menu featuring jerk Cornish hen and red snapper. “We wanted a nice blend of both cultures,” Dr. Alexander said.