A Discreet Relationship and a Surprising Discovery

Four years into Jaspreet Kaur and Mandeep Singh’s relationship, they discovered that their families had a connection dating back to their early childhoods.

Kaur’s father, Surjit Singh, was a well-known Sikh immigration lawyer in Anaheim, Calif. Singh’s father, Bulwinder Singh, who lived in Jamaica, Queens, had sought Surjit’s help with an immigration case in the summer of 1997. Bulwinder, who is also Sikh, flew across the country to meet him.

Eighteen years later, Kaur, who goes by Rosie, and Singh first spotted each other in June 2015 at an alumni event for the nonprofit Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, where Singh had interned, in Washington.

Kaur, who was going into her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley, was interning at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Singh had graduated the month before with a bachelor’s degree in urban studies and business from Columbia and was about to move to San Francisco for a job.

“Mandeep spent the evening in a joking argument with his friend over who got to sit on a couch that seemed comfier than the rest,” Kaur said. “I chuckled and was drawn to him, but I didn’t have the guts to introduce myself.”

The attraction was mutual, though neither knew it at the time. “I spotted Rosie and thought how stunning she was,” Singh said, but he, too, was “too nervous” to approach her.

Although both said they often thought of the other over the following year, it wasn’t until they matched on Tinder in June 2016 that anything could take hold. “Mandeep’s first line to me in his message was ‘I think I know you from somewhere,’” Kaur said. “I pretended not to know him and said, ‘Yeah, you seem familiar.’”

Their first date was in July, at Taqueria Cancun, a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District, where Singh lived.

When Kaur saw Singh waiting for her, she said her “heart skipped a beat.”

Singh was taken, too. “Right away, I thought that I should have picked someplace fancier because this beautiful girl deserves the best,” he said.

Over a shared platter of tacos, they bonded over their Sikh backgrounds. Kaur, who grew up in Anaheim, Calif., attended a gurdwara, a Sikh house of worship, every Sunday, while Singh, from Jamaica, Queens, regularly volunteered at his. Their conversation also touched on Punjabi culture and their shared interest in poetry and feminism.

“Mandeep talked so beautifully about his mother and how she carried the weight of her family on her shoulders,” Kaur said. “It was tender and showed me his feminist ideologies.”

They chatted for five hours and planned their next date before the night ended.

“I went home and told my roommate that I thought Mandeep was the one,” Kaur said.

They started meeting several times a week and communicated constantly. They alternated dates between San Francisco and Berkeley and often went mini golfing, hiking and to Punjabi folk dancing events.

Despite “falling in love,” both said, their relationship was kept a secret.

“Casual dating in the Sikh American community is quite taboo,” Kaur said.

“It was hard keeping the walls up around my relationship with Rosie,” Singh said.

Kaur, 31, is a government investigations and education litigation lawyer at O’Melveny & Myers in New York. She has a bachelor’s in business administration from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and a law degree from Harvard.

Singh, 33, is the head of revenue operations and strategy in the New York office of TwelveLabs, a video intelligence platform based in San Francisco.

Singh moved back to New York in the summer of 2020 and bought an apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, where the couple lives now. Kaur moved from San Francisco to Boston in August 2020 to start law school at Harvard.

That November, their relationship finally came out into the open. The couple had resolved to get engaged and tell their families about their relationship after her first year of law school. But then, Kaur’s father suddenly died of cardiac arrest.

“Mandeep dropped everything to fly home to California with me, and it was obvious that we were together,” Kaur said.

Singh subsequently told his parents about Kaur — and that her father had died. “My father’s jaw dropped when he realized it was the lawyer he had flown cross-country to see all those years ago,” he said.

The connection made Kaur feel her father “knew the man I would marry even though he was no longer there.”

The pair became engaged months later on a trip to Lake Como, Italy. During a boat ride, Singh recited a poem he’d written, asking Kaur to marry him.

They wed on Oct. 30 at Calamigos Ranch in Malibu, Calif., before 300 guests. Gurleen Kaur Riar, a Sikh priest who was ordained by the Provenance Center for Ordination, now Lovebird.org, officiated.

The newlyweds hosted their reception on Halloween at Hummingbird Nest Ranch in Santa Susana, Calif. A dhol player, or drummer, played bhangra beats, and guests danced to the same Punjabi songs the couple had danced to in their early years of dating.