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Margaret Brennan, Yado Yakub
It Took Time but Was Worth It
Image
CreditCreditJason Chan
By Vincent M. Mallozzi
April 12, 2015
Margaret Mary Brennan and Maj. Ali Iyad Yakub were married Saturday evening at the Decatur House in Washington. The Rev. Raymond Kemp, a Roman Catholic priest, officiated.
The bride, 35, is keeping her name. She is a Washington-based correspondent for CBS News, covering national security and foreign policy.
She is a daughter of Jane L. Brennan and Edward J. Brennan of Washington Crossing, Pa. The bride’s father is a senior director at the Guardian Life Insurance Company of America in New York. Her mother is the head of the craft program for the Bucks County Neighbors, an education program for seniors, and teaches art history and art appreciation to elementary school students in the Pennsbury School District in Pennsbury, Pa.
The groom, 37, is known as Yado. He serves as a judge advocate in the Marine Corps and is stationed at the Pentagon. He received a law degree from the University of Miami.
He is a son of Rolana I. Yakub and Dr. Y. Nabil Yakub of McLean, Va. The groom’s mother is a preschool teacher at Country Day School in McLean. His father is a nephrologist at Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va.
Ms. Brennan and Mr. Yakub met September 1998, at the University of Virginia, from which they later graduated, Ms. Brennan with highest distinction.
At the time, however, he was a senior, and she was a freshman. And it was not exactly love at first sight.
“I thought she was attractive but very serious,” he said, and perhaps worse, “very Connecticut.”
“I think ‘very Connecticut’ was code for uptight,” said Ms. Brennan, who attended an all-girls Catholic high school in Greenwich before enrolling at Virginia.
She saw Mr. Yakub as “a bit of a party boy.”
They went their separate ways, and the next time he appeared on her radar screen was in the summer of 2000, between Ms. Brennan’s sophomore and junior years at Virginia. During that time, she studied abroad for a semester of Arabic at Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan, and Mr. Yakub’s sister was one of her apartment mates in an all-women dorm just off campus.
“The program was very intense, so there was no time to think about anything else,” Ms. Brennan said. “Yado’s name came up occasionally, but I wasn’t thinking about him in any special way at that time.”
Three years later, Mr. Yakub resurfaced again through a mutual friend who was dating Ms. Brennan. “I was living in Manhattan, and my boyfriend and I were in Miami, where Yado was attending law school,” she said, “and he decided to call Yado and invite him out to dinner. It was a real casual thing.”
In June 2012, Ms. Brennan, who was now unattached, moved to Washington, where Mr. Yakub’s sister was living. Two months later, the two women reconnected.
“Yado’s name came up again,” Ms. Brennan said. “I got a kick out of hearing that he was in the military and a lawyer as well. He was someone I had remembered in T-shirts and flip-flops at Virginia.”
As it turned out, Mr. Yakub had moved to Washington in December 2012 to begin a congressional fellowship. He had been stationed at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, Calif.
On a February Sunday in 2013, Ms. Brennan was walking her dog on a Washington street when she ran into Mr. Yakub, who was waiting for a bus.
“It was an incredible, crazy coincidence,” she said.
He invited her to a party he was hosting at his apartment the next month, and she attended. By the end of that night, Ms. Brennan said that she had come to realize that the frat boy she had known in college “had become this incredibly sophisticated, cultured, smart and really fun guy, and he was cute, too.”
They exchanged emails and began dating in June 2013. By July, they were a couple.
“It’s a pretty crazy series of events that got us together,” Mr. Yakub said. “I always thought she was too uptight, but I had never really taken the time to get to know her. Once we began talking, I realized that she was a very warm, very down-to-earth person.”
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page ST16 of the New York edition with the headline: It Took Time but Was Worth It. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe