Lisa M. Yu ’11 & Daniel C. Suo ’10

It took all her willpower to refrain from opening the love letter before she was allowed to.

Daniel C. Suo ’10, the outgoing president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Chinese Students Association, had given his successor and friend, Lisa M. Yu ’11, a note to read on her morning flight home for January Term 2010, several weeks after they attended multiple formals together. Yu opened the letter on the plane shortly before take-off.

“I started grinning like an idiot,” she said. “It was just about how he couldn’t stop thinking about me after Winthrop formal … He essentially ended it with ‘All I really want for Christmas is you.’”

The two began dating shortly thereafter. They plan to be married on Aug, 18, 2012.

Yu first met Suo briefly during her Prefrosh Weekend when she attended an event for CSA.

After Yu joined the organization during the winter of her freshman year, she and Suo started working together extensively, although their personal relationship did not develop until after Suo stepped down as president at the end of the fall 2009 semester.“We went to a few formals together, and I was very set on making things happen, so I did,” Suo said.

He decided to propose this past winter. After meeting Yu’s parents over winter break, he said he felt the time was right. He first considered a public proposal at the CSA banquet, but decided “sentimental was probably better than a big flashy show.”

The weekend before this Valentine’s Day, Suo, who works at Goldman Sachs in New York, came to visit Yu in Cambridge. The couple had dinner at Yenching in Harvard Square and then took a walk to Suo’s parents’ former home at 20 Ware St., behind Pennypacker.

“He took me to that apartment and said, ‘This is where my parents started their married life and I started my life, and we can start our life together,’”  Yu said.

In September, Yu will be moving in with Suo in New York and working at McKinsey.Given their time-intensive careers, they have hired a wedding coordinator and plan to keep things “simple and elegant, and not too pretentious,”  Yu said.

Suo said the progression of their relationship has felt very natural. “What I love the most about our relationship is just the simplicity of it, it’s never felt tiring, it’s never been complex,” Suo said. “I’ve been in plenty of relationships, but it’s the first for both of us where communication came first and came very easily.”

“We make decisions in a similar way. Even when we disagree, we can work it out without getting too emotional or upset,” Yu said. “It just feels really right.”

—H. ZANE B. WRUBLE