In the summer of 2023, Christopher William Sater and Traci Ryan Green hosted a combined engagement party and baby shower. “The theme was ‘Engaged and Expecting,’” he said.
It wasn’t a party the two could have ever imagined having when they first matched on the dating app Bumble in March 2017.
“I remember Traci’s profile from her pictures,” Mr. Sater said. “She was sitting in a bar with a beer in front of her, and it looked like it was as big as she was. I thought, ‘She looks like fun.’”
The two began messaging regularly, but because of their work and travel schedules, they didn’t meet in person until about a month later.
“I was going on lots of Bumble dates, and I was tired of spending a lot of money and drinking during the week,” Mr. Sater said. So, he suggested a walk. They met in San Francisco, where they were living, at the Ferry Building. They had so much fun talking that they ended with dinner at Nick’s, a restaurant in the Fisherman’s Wharf area.
“Not the sexiest activity,” Mr. Sater said. “We sat in a dingy, old booth and the waiter could not get it into his head that we were locals. He wanted us to ‘try’ Anchor Steam,” a local beer that the two were all too familiar with.
Their second date, a week later, was to the Exploratorium, a science museum.
They had their first kiss on their third date in the Mission District during a Cinco de Mayo celebration. “That’s when things really started to moved forward,” Mr. Sater said.
By early summer, “we sort of unofficially became a couple,” Mr. Sater said. A year later, they moved into an apartment together in the NoPa neighborhood.
After five years, they knew they wanted to get married and have a family. They just weren’t sure they wanted to do it in that order.
“It was an age thing,” Ms. Green said. “We didn’t want to be 40 before we had a kid, and we wanted time to plan a wedding with friends and family.”
In December 2022, they found out they were expecting. And just a few days later, on Dec. 23, 2022, Mr. Sater, who had planned a proposal months prior, asked Ms. Green if she would marry him in the same spot in the Ferry Building where they first met in person.
“I had a sleeve of saltines in one pocket and a vitamin water in the other,” Ms. Green, who was about six weeks pregnant at the time, said.
On Aug. 14, 2023, their son, Carson, was born.
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Mr. Sater, 38, is in strategic partnerships development for Chrome at Google. He has a bachelor’s degree in human biology and a master’s degree in earth systems from Stanford. He was born and raised in Mountain View, Calif., and raised in Los Altos, Calif.
Ms. Green, 37, is a senior product manager at Uber Freight. She has two bachelor’s degrees, one in finance and one in political science, from the University of Florida. She was born in Queens, N.Y., and raised in Hicksville, N.Y., then Coral Springs, Fla.
Mr. Sater and Ms. Green now live in an apartment in the Eureka Valley neighborhood of San Francisco.
They were wed on July 13 at Sequoia Woods Country Club in Arnold, Calif., a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where Mr. Sater’s parents built a cabin when he was 4. “So I’ve been going there as long as I can remember. During the pandemic, Traci and I lived in Arnold for the better part of a year,” he said.
Laura Carwile, a friend of Mr. Sater’s from college who was ordained for the occasion by Universal Life Church, officiated. The wedding included the couple’s 11-month-old son, who wore a three-piece linen suit with a bow tie that matched Mr. Sater’s.
“A few times during the ceremony, I looked out at all our friends and family, including Carson, staring up at us from the front row and watching intently and kept content with snacks,” Ms. Green said. “Seeing their smiles and tears in response to our vows put me over the edge with emotion.”
At the end of the night, “guests formed a big circle on the dance floor and belted out ‘Wonderwall’ by Oasis while Traci and I danced in the middle,” Mr. Sater said. “It was surreal.”
