Taylor Suzanne Burt was at work and fully in her element when she met Mayank Kishor Shah in September 2018.
“I’m a huge dog person,” said Ms. Burt, then an efficiency coordinator at BarkBox, a monthly dog toy and treat subscription service. “There were so many puppies at the office. You’d have a puppy on your desk, a puppy falling asleep in your lap.”
Mr. Shah, who had come in to interview for a job, became another pleasant distraction: He and Ms. Burt chatted and joked in the office, then located in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood. When he left, “I remember thinking, ‘who the hell was that guy? I hope he comes back.’” Two weeks later, he was hired.
Neither Ms. Burt nor Mr. Shah, who had been recruited as a data engineer, still work at BarkBox. Ms. Burt, 29, now works on influencer partnerships at Etsy, and Mr. Shah, 35, is a data engineer at DoubleVerify, a tech company. But both credit the company’s culture with steering their romance from puppy love to the real thing.
At BarkBox, “everyone hung out all the time,” Ms. Burt said. After a month or two of getting to know each other, Ms. Burt, who lived in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, started referring to Mr. Shah in phone calls with a friend as “the boy I love at work” (distinct, she said, from “the boy I love on the bus” and “the boy I love who I saw in the store”). Mr. Shah, then living near Astor Place in Manhattan, wanted to move past the office banter to something more personal, too.
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That was obvious to Stacie Grissom, Ms. Burt’s supervisor. “I worked on the second floor,” Ms. Burt said. “Mayank would always find himself coming down to talk and flirt. My boss was like, What are you doing? Why are you down here?”
By 2019, they were increasingly tuning out their colleagues in favor of private conversations at after-work happy hours. It was getting late at one such gathering on April 19, 2019, at Loreley Beer Garden on the Lower East Side, when their office mates started dwindling. “We were a group of six, and then we were a group of five, then a group of three,” Mr. Shah said. “Then our friend got up to go to the bathroom and I kissed her.”
Ms. Burt, who grew up in Orlando and has a bachelor’s in art history from N.Y.U., was elated. But a bout of embarrassment followed at the office the next day.
Mr. Shah, who earned a bachelor’s in finance from Tulane University and was raised in Baton Rouge, La., sent Ms. Burt an early-morning message. “It said, ‘I left my dignity in the beer garden,’ or some goofy thing,” Ms. Burt said. “From there, we were both kind of like, ‘Is this going to happen again?’”
Both wanted it to. A plenitude of Manhattan watering holes helped. By summer, they were leaving happy hours early to be alone together at other bars. By the end of the year, they were casually dating, an open secret around the office.
The pandemic nudged them closer to commitment. Mr. Shah, whose mother works in emergency management, had told him early in 2020 that he should leave the city. He followed her advice and, with his roommate and his roommate’s younger sister, rented an Airbnb in Carolina Beach, N.C. Before they left, he asked Ms. Burt to come along.
“It was a little weird,” Mr. Shah said, because neither knew how serious they were about the other. But she was game. By the time they returned to New York a few months later, they were in love. In 2021, they moved to Miami, where each worked remotely. In early 2023, they moved to a new apartment in Williamsburg together.
Ms. Burt and Ms. Taylor are both only children. So when she said yes to his proposal on April 19, 2024, at Loreley Beer Garden — the five-year anniversary of their first kiss there — they thought about how they could make their wedding special for their parents, too. “This is their one chance at having a child getting married,” Ms. Burt said.
On Oct. 4, they celebrated Mr. Shah’s parents and culture with an Indian welcome party, or sangeet, at 74Wythe, an event space in Brooklyn. Guests dressed in Indian attire, and halfway through, the couple exchanged garlands, a symbol of love.
The next day, Ms. Burt and Mr. Shah were married at the William Vale, also in Brooklyn. Ms. Grissom, Ms. Burt’s former BarkBox boss, who became a Universal Life Church minister for the occasion, officiated.
Among their 152 guests were a few former BarkBox co-workers, who nodded in recognition when Ms. Grissom mentioned Mr. Shah’s “incessant” flirting with Ms. Burt before they became a couple.
“It was intense,” Ms. Grissom said.
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