“There was nothing about her that I didn’t love,” he said. They have been together ever since.
Ms. Finetti, now 26, went on to study at California State University, Chico, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in political science. Mr. Lopez, now 25, attended the University of Silicon Valley in San Jose, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in art and animation.
By 2019, they were living together as college students in Chico. Both retreated to their parents’ homes during the early months of Covid, but by 2021 they were again sharing a household in Santa Clara, Calif. In 2023, each took jobs — she as a senior subcontract administrator for Lockheed Martin, the aerospace company, and he as a designer at a robotics company — that routed them to their current home in Oakland, Calif.
A year earlier, in July 2022, they had become engaged at Rancho Rubalcava, a San Jose ranch owned by Mr. Lopez’s aunt and uncle, but not everyone liked the timing. Mr. Lopez said his mother “had been adamant that I wait until after I had my degree” to propose. “I had made it all the way to my senior year, and we had been talking about marriage for years. I couldn’t wait any longer,” he said.
The couple exercised considerable patience, however, in the nearly three years it took to plan their May 4 wedding at Rancho Rubalcava — in part because they needed time to work on projects for their wedding theme.
Mr. Lopez is among the many “Star Wars” fans who celebrate May 4, or Star Wars Day (“may the fourth be with you”). “I’m a huge nerd,” he said, as if to explain the life-size Jabba the Hutt sculpture he built out of chicken wire, liquid latex and craft foam for the reception.
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