Robin Charlotte Ried and Christopher Harold Staudt were married Saturday in the Siasconset Union Chapel in Siasconset, Mass., on the island of Nantucket. The Rev. Nancy Forsyth Nelson, a minister of your American Fellowship Church, performed the ceremony.
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Ms. Ried, 29, will maintain her name. She would be the head of urban development and is a global leadership fellow in the Planet Financial Forum in New York. She graduated from Brown and received a masters degree in city planning from the University of California, Berkeley. From 2004 to 2005, she was a Fulbright scholar in Barcelona, Spain, focused on environmentally sustainable neighborhood style.
She is a daughter of Susan Ried and Robert H. Ried of Palm City, Fla. The brides father retired this year as an economist and a founder of Ried, Thunberg & Company, a money-market forecasting firm in Westport, Conn.
Mr. Staudt, 36, is really a director in the private investment division of Emigrant Bank in New York and is responsible for identifying new investment opportunities. He graduated from Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., and received an M.B.A. from Harvard. From 2002 to 2004, he was a Peace Corps volunteer working on microfinance and soil-conservation projects in a rural area outside of Bainet, Haiti.
He would be the son of Christina and William Staudt of Bronxville, N.Y. His father also works at Emigrant Bank in New York, where he can be a vice chairman, overseeing commercial lending. The bridegrooms mother is the chairwoman of an interdisciplinary forum on death, dying and grief at Columbia University, and is also a patient-care volunteer plus a member of the fund-raising board at Jansen Hospice and Palliative Care in Scarsdale, N.Y.
The couple had their first conversation in August 2012, in the wedding of Caroline Staudt, the bridegrooms youngest sister. Ms. Ried had gone to boarding school and college with Caroline Staudt, but somehow despite several family photographs showing Ms. Ried and Mr. Staudt in the same frame they had never taken notice of each other.
Ms. Ried had arrived at the wedding wearing a yellow wedding dress and a flower in her hair, and Mr. Staudt was entranced.
Its one of those indescribable moments, he said. I just felt compelled to talk to her.
His mother took care from the proper introduction, which Ms. Ried viewed as a continuation of a campaign that had begun the previous winter with a Staudt family Christmas card that prominently featured Mr. Staudt alone amid his happily paired sisters and parents.
Robin was convinced my mother was sending that only to single friends, Mr. Staudt remembered.
Ms. Ried said, It was like someone was trying to stuff my mailbox with an advertisement about him. She remembers laughing when she saw the picture, thinking that he looked awkward and alone but very cute! It seemed like his mom was sending out a subtle hint to the world that her son was a catch.
He asked to visit her the next time his business took him out to California, where she was then living. That opportunity occurred just a few weeks later, and he then extended his trip so that he could see her again a few days later.
In the next few months, he made several more trips to California, but it was not until Ms. Ried moved back to New York that the couple began truly dating.
It took 11 months for even the first peck on the lips, Ms. Ried said. Everything felt so right about being together that I fought it, but I finally gave in to the inevitable.