Kate Spear-Brodsky and Louai Abu-Osba

The couple met at Hampshire College, from which they graduated.

The bride, 29, is the associate photo editor in New York for Inc., a magazine published by Mansueto Ventures.

Her father is an abstract painter whose works have appeared at the Sears-Peyton Gallery in New York and at Butler’s Fine Art and Antiques in Amagansett, N.Y. Her mother is a painter represented by the gallery Sara Tecchia Roma New York; she also teaches art.

The bride is a stepdaughter of Corry Kittner.

The bridegroom, 30, is a freelance animator in New York whose projects have included interactive video games for Scholastic, the educational publisher.

His mother was an assistant professor and taught Arabic language and Middle Eastern culture in Monterey, Calif. His father is the head of the neonatal intensive care unit at Jordan Hospital in Amman.

The bridegroom is a stepson of Muna Abu-Osba.

Ms. Spear-Brodsky and Mr. Abu-Osba met in October 2002 when she visited a fellow student’s apartment to watch movies. Mr. Abu-Osba often came to the apartment to play video games with a friend who also lived there, and to cook spicy meals.

“It was as spicy as humanly possible so no one else would eat it,” Ms. Spear-Brodsky remembered.

In truth, she wasn’t sure what to make of Mr. Abu-Osba, who wore his hair in long dreadlocks. “I thought he was a little bit nerdy,” Ms. Spear-Brodsky said. “He was very sweet and flirty in an innocent way, but I just wasn’t interested in having a boyfriend at the time. Also, he had no game whatsoever.”

As Halloween neared, she asked him what costume he was going to wear at the campus party. He revealed plans to go as a software pirate and hand out pirated software. But Ms. Spear-Brodsky said she mistook his answer to mean he “was going to be like Jack Sparrow” and asked if he was going to wear an eye patch.

He was initially taken aback by the question, but then quickly readjusted his costume design — especially after she told him “eye patches are sexy.” Put in that context, he recalled, “I made sure I was wearing an eye patch.”

Still, Mr. Abu-Osba admitted: “It was a geeky costume. I basically dressed up as a pirate wearing a red bandanna, and I had written a Windows 2000 serial number across it and gave away a bunch of CDs.”

Ms. Spear-Brodsky wasn’t sure what to make of the costume. “His brain functions in a way that I don’t get, but it seemed so endearing to me that he had gone out and bought an eye patch for it even though it didn’t fit with the rest of his costume,” she said.

At the party, they danced. “I became much more attracted to her,” he said. “I was kind of dumbfounded by my luck.”

The next night Mr. Abu-Osba dropped by her apartment but she wasn’t there. The night after that he tried again. As he headed toward her apartment he ran into a friend of Ms. Brodsky-Spear who told him she was home. Then the friend phoned Ms. Brodsky-Spear to tell her he was on his way.

“My friend told me he got so excited he started dancing in the middle of the road,” Ms. Brodsky-Spear said, “and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this guy’s such a nerd,’ but it’s so cute.”

The couple chose an olive branch as their theme for the Jewish-Muslim union, and the ceremony under a wedding canopy combined readings in Arabic and English, and a traditional Palestinian wedding dance. PAULA SCHWARTZ