Bonding Over Books and Long Car Rides

“Guess where this photo was taken” was the prompt John Sasscer Sanders Jr. gave alongside a photo on his Hinge dating profile. The image captured Mr. Sanders at a book-signing event for the sociologist Matthew Desmond during the 2023 National Book Festival in Washington.

Shannon Shiyi Wu had volunteered at the festival that year, and was familiar with Mr. Desmond’s work. So when Mr. Sanders liked one of her profile photos in September 2023, Ms. Wu checked out his profile and saw the photo from the festival. “I know exactly where that is,” she responded. “That book is ‘Poverty, by America.’” They chatted about how Ms. Wu had read Mr. Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Evicted,” and visited the exhibit it inspired at the National Building Museum in 2018.

It was the first of many shared interests for the couple. Their first date, days after they matched on Hinge, however, got off to a rough start when Mr. Sanders went to the wrong location of the coffee shop where they had agreed to meet. Once they pieced together the snafu and found each other 30 minutes later, the conversation flowed easily.

[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]

She was “very easy to talk to, very engaging and fun,” Mr. Sanders said. “I thought she had a wonderful, distinctive laugh.”

Ms. Wu, 33, is the director of payment policy at the American Hospital Association. Born and raised in Libertyville, Ill., she received a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Princeton and a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.