By ROSALIE R. RADOMSKY
Published: April 15, 2010 - New York Times
Monica Youngna Youn and Whitney Brewster Armstrong were married Saturday evening at St. Thomas Church in New York. The Rev. Jonathan M. Erdman, an Episcopal priest and the church’s curate and youth minister, performed the ceremony.
Ms. Youn, 38, is keeping her name. She is a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, where she works on campaign finance reform and election law issues. She also wrote two books of poetry, “Barter” and “Ignatz.” She graduated cum laude from Princeton, and received a Master of Philosophy in English literature from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She also holds a law degree from Yale.
She is the daughter of Chan Ju Youn and Kun Chee Youn of Houston. The bride’s father is the president of Weeco International Corporation, an environmental engineering firm there. Her mother is the owner of the Gulfland Real Estate Company, a residential and commercial agency, also in Houston.
Mr. Armstrong, 44, is a landscape designer for Katie Winter Architecture, which focuses on renovation projects for the Archdiocese of New York. With his father and a sister, Amory Spizzirri, he is a founding partner in a consultancy in decorative and fine arts in Greenwich, Conn., and New York.
The bridegroom graduated cum laude from Yale and received a master’s in landscape architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard.
He is a son of Bunty Armstrong and Tom Armstrong of New York. His mother is a director of the Women’s Prison Association, which runs a halfway house and provides counseling to recently released female inmates in New York. From 1974 to 1990, the bridegroom’s father was the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Until 1995, he was the founding director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. He is now the chairman of the board of the Garden Conservancy in Cold Spring, N.Y., a nonprofit preservation organization that opens private gardens to the public.
The couple met in February 2008 at the party of a mutual friend. Mr. Armstrong noticed Ms. Youn as soon as she walked in, but he had to leave very early the following morning for Wyoming.
“I was clearly looking at her,” he remembered. “Staring, I guess. I didn’t know I was doing it. I was torn between leaving the next day and engaging in a potentially new adventure.”
After 90 minutes, Ms. Youn finally approached him. “He had a good-humored twinkle in his eyes, and was very knowledgeable without taking himself too seriously, ” she said. Their conversation, she recalled, included politics, her forte, and art, which is his.
Mr. Armstrong soon resigned himself to sleeping on the plane. Before leaving the party, he got Ms. Youn’s two e-mail addresses, but he could make out only one when he got home, and sent her a note saying “I’m asking you out” in the subject line.
The next morning he slept through the alarm, and missed his flight to Jackson Hole. When he finally arrived, he checked his e-mail and found there was no response from Ms. Youn.
“I was perplexed,” he recalled thinking. “I thought it was real.”
He e-mailed their mutual friend to see if he had the right address. She told him that the first address was a work address, and steered him to the other one; he promptly forwarded his original message.
“How magical it was,” Ms. Youn remembered thinking when she saw it.
Mr. Armstrong received her response minutes later, and they arranged to meet the day he returned to New York.
A version of this article appeared in print on April 18, 2010, on page ST13 of the New York edition.
