Parallel Lives Until Something ‘Clicked’

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Annie Lynne Lee and Landon Spiller Dickey were married Dec. 15. Jane Kim, a member of San Francisco’s board of supervisors, officiated at San Francisco City Hall.

Ms. Lee, 30, is a staff lawyer in San Francisco for the federal Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, received a master’s degree in teaching from Fordham and received a law degree cum laude from Harvard. In 2009-11, she was a Teach for America corps member, teaching 11th-grade United States history at Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science in the Bronx.

She is a daughter of Bor Szeto Lee and George Lee of South San Francisco, Calif. The bride’s father retired as a self-employed residential construction and renovations contractor in South San Francisco. Her mother is a letter carrier in San Francisco for the United States Postal Service.

Mr. Dickey, also 30, works for the San Francisco Unified School District as the special assistant to the superintendent for African-American achievement and leadership. He graduated cum laude and received an M.B.A. from Harvard, and also received a master’s degree in teaching from Hunter College. From 2009-11, he was a Teach for America corps member, also in the Bronx, teaching special education students at Public School 195.

He is the son of Pamela R. Dickey and Dr. Leonel V. Dickey of San Francisco. The groom’s mother retired as a sales representative in San Francisco for Merck & Company, the pharmaceuticals concern. His father is a dentist in private practice, with offices in San Francisco and in San Jose, Calif.

The couple initially met when both were 17, at an event for high school seniors who had been accepted to Brown University. The gathering was in the backyard of a house in San Francisco’s Presidio neighborhood that belonged to a Brown alumnus. Ms. Lee remembers the moment vividly; Mr. Dickey does not.

Their next meeting was more than a year later. Both had taken summer internships in the San Francisco office of Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Ms. Lee recognized him immediately.

“I ran up to him and said, ‘Did you go to Brown or Harvard?’ He responded, ‘Who are you?’” she said.

Nonetheless, this time, she made an impression. “She’s incredibly passionate, a force of nature, full of life,” Mr. Dickey said.

She said she is impressed by him, too. “There are not very many people who would go to Harvard undergrad and Harvard Business School and yet would come back to their communities to make sure that other people get the same opportunities he did,” she said. “It is something that I deeply respect.”

Working together that summer, they became friends, and even went to a movie together, “Snakes on a Plane,” but it was a friends event, not a romantic outing.

The next summer, she had an internship in Ms. Feinstein’s Washington office and he began an internship for then-Senator Barack Obama. The senators both were based in the Hart Senate Office Building, and so Ms. Lee and Mr. Dickey renewed their friendship. With emphasis still on the “friends.”

Both joined Teach for America after college, and both were assigned schools in New York City. They were in different grade levels, though, so they saw each other only a couple of times.

After Teach for America, both went to Harvard for graduate school. And after their first year of grad school, both returned to San Francisco for the summer.

Once again, they met up. But this time, for Mr. Dickey at least, there was something new. “Something just clicked for me,” he said.

When they got back to Massachusetts in the fall, he invited her to a party. They shared a cab afterward and after she got out, he found himself calling her and asking her to come back outside and meet him for just a moment.

It was 2012, and they had led parallel lives for seven years.

“We met out on the street in front of the house, and I told her I really liked her, asked if I could kiss her,” he said. “And she said yes.”