Andy Tau & Jocelyn Hsu

The romance began in a slightly sketchy, albeit familiar, way.

On his brother’s advice, J. Andy Tau ’07 was trolling through the freshman facebook looking for beautiful women when he came across the picture of Jocelyn D. Hsu ’07.

“And what do you know,” Tau, a Houston native, remembers. “The most beautiful girl in there was Asian, from Texas, and I had already met her doing dorm crew, so it was perfect.”

The couple is getting married on July 7 at Hsu’s high school chapel, St. Stephen’s Episcopal in Austin, Texas. There will be a reception at their country club that day, with a Texas-style BBQ the following afternoon.

Despite Tau’s persistent pursuit, the path to the altar was an difficult one. Deborah Y. Ho ’07, his future blockmate, recalls composing a list of prettiest freshmen girls one night with another friend.

“When we were done with the list though, he looked it over and then put her way at the top, half a page above everyone else,” Ho writes in an e-mail.

Friendship blossomed, but relations remained platonic. Tau finally got together the nerve to ask Hsu out, but she turned down the former football recruit. She compared this rejection to his favorite sport: dating Tau then would have been “like football—you still love it, but it’s just not the right time,” she said. Tau was undeterred.

According to Hsu’s mother, her daughter’s affections were won freshman year on a tough night filled with academic deadlines and feelings of homesickness. Tau purposefully left his laser pointer in Hsu’s room in Grays Middle and called a few minutes later, directing her to shoot him with it across the yard. “He briefly described some game rules and started running around the Yard, jumping and dodging the ‘laser gun,’” Hsu’s mother writes in a e-mail, “Whenever Jocelyn succeeded in shooting him, he would exaggerate his pain of dying from the shot and made Jocelyn laugh for a good half hour.”

Though unconventional, Tau’s efforts worked. Since then, the two economics concentrators have spent “at least five hours a day together, and often eight or nine,” says Tau. Hsu was co-captain of the Asian-American Dance Team (AADT), and Tau would often take his schoolwork to the practices.

When he decided to propose this year, Tau secretly enlisted the help of Hsu’s blockmates for a 12-hour treasure hunt across Boston through all the places that were special to their romantic life. The day began with a rose at morning dance practice from a roommate and ended with Tau on his knees at the Weeks Footbridge surrounded by candles and their closest friends.

“Our entire blocking group was stunned at the first planning meeting for the proposal day,” says roommate May Habib ’07, the former associate managing editor of The Crimson. “Andy had an Excel spreadsheet! It kind of sucks for us because he set the bar pretty high.”

Although it is a commute from Hsu’s future home at the University of Texas at Austin Law School to Tau’s new base at the Baylor University College of Medicine, the couple decided that they would prefer to get married before starting graduate school.

Unlike some other young marriages, the rationale behind the wedding is unrelated to their religious beliefs. “The important part is how much time you spend with the person, not how long you’ve been together,” Tau says. “The people in the relationship know what it is like better than anyone else.”

It helps that their families get along very well, the couple says. “Our mothers are like giggly sisters,” says Hsu.

—Staff writer Scoop A. Wasserstein can be reached at wasserst@fas.harvard.edu.