It was in Aspen that Jessica Schoenfeld and Zach Sperling found their happy place — and planned a wedding at a mountaintop beach club.
When Jenna Sperling met Jessica Anna Schoenfeld at a dinner in March 2018, she knew that Ms. Schoenfeld would be a good match for her brother, Zachary Marshall Sperling. It didn’t take much convincing once Ms. Schoenfeld saw a few photos of him.
“There may have been one shirtless picture on the beach somewhere, and I was like, All right, I like the look of this guy,” Ms. Schoenfeld said, laughing.
Two weeks later, they met up for the first time at Fedora, a now-closed cocktail bar and restaurant in the West Village in Manhattan. Mr. Sperling, now 31, chose the restaurant. Before she met Mr. Sperling, Ms. Schoenfeld, now 28, was a vegetarian and preferred pizza to the steak tartare on the menu.
“We’re opposites, but it works really well because I get to bring her out of her comfort zone,” Mr. Sperling said. “And she makes me better in a lot of the ways that maybe I wouldn’t be without her.”
She was used to texting; Mr. Sperling preferred conversations in person or on the phone. Ms. Schoenfeld often had “light” conversations, she said, but Mr. Sperling wanted to cover everything, including religion and politics.
They had a few things in common, however: Both had graduated from Tulane University and had participated in campus Greek life. Mr. Sperling graduated in 2014 with a degree in political science and international relations, and Ms. Schoenfeld graduated in 2017 with a degree in sociology. Both are Jewish and enjoy traveling.
As the conversation flowed that night, the two inched closer to each other in the booth, talking until the restaurant neared closing time. A sushi date and several others followed.
Ms. Schoenfeld was struck by how different Mr. Sperling was from the other men she dated. “People just weren’t as deep and intentional and direct as Zach was,” she said. “At first I found that daunting because I wasn’t used to it. And then I came to really appreciate it, because I always knew how he felt.”
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Mr. Sperling was struck by Ms. Schoenfeld’s kindness and the energy she brought to their conversations.
Ms. Schoenfeld, who is originally from Stamford, Conn., but spent time in Manhattan growing up, works as a travel and lifestyle manager at Roman & Erica Inc., a luxury travel and lifestyle management firm based in New York. Mr. Sperling, who grew up on the Upper East Side, is the executive director of East West Basics, a manufacturing and procurement firm based in China that he runs alongside his sister and father, Robert Sperling.
By the summer of 2019, the couple moved in together on the Upper East Side. In December of that year, they visited Beaver Creek, Colo., on a ski trip and a seed was planted. Ms. Schoenfeld, who had not been skiing in over a decade, began taking lessons. They also talked about a life outside the city. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, they left the city for Long Island to live with Mr. Sperling’s family.
“Zach was really set on the mountains, and I was just ready for a new adventure,” she said. “I was willing to take that plunge.”
They moved to Aspen, Colo., in August 2020, somewhere neither of them knew well. Mr. Sperling had visited Utah and Telluride, Colo., but Aspen seemed to meet their criteria. They wanted to live near the mountains, preferably in a ski town, where they could also enjoy the trappings of city life with restaurants and art galleries.
Initially, Mr. Sperling thought Aspen might be too “ostentatious,” he said, but they were pleasantly surprised by the community’s welcome.
Mr. Sperling proposed in July 2021 at the restaurant Topping Rose House in Bridgehampton, N.Y. When Ms. Schoenfeld arrived, Mr. Sperling was waiting to surprise her on bended knee in the garden.
On April 6, the couple wed on Aspen Mountain at the AspenX Beach Club with 72 guests in attendance. Jillian Salant, who is the groom’s best friend, was ordained by the Universal Life Church to officiate the wedding. She joked during the ceremony that the couple’s biggest obstacle would be “rising interest rates” — a nod to the couple’s challenging search for a house.
To kick off the celebrations, there was no first dance; instead, there was a first ski. After cocktail hour, the newlyweds led 30 guests down the mountain into a reception at the Little Nell Wine Bar.
“This is our happy place,” Mr. Sperling said. “We want to have kids here and just continue on this journey.”