“She’s really funny, and I found her super attractive,” he said. Instead of sitting down to dinner, something Dr. Poon wanted to avoid because he is a messy eater — “I have a friend who describes me as the ugliest eater he’s ever seen,” he said — they strolled the market. They told each other dad jokes and talked about their pasts. When Ms. Aquino’s ride back to her hotel arrived, they kissed good night.

Dr. Poon grew up in the western Canadian province of Saskatchewan. His mother, Dr. Teik Im Ooi, is Malaysian; his father, Dr. Edward Toyin Poon, was born in China. Both are family physicians. His parents had met in medical school and moved to Canada in 1984. When Dr. Poon left Saskatchewan for the University of Alberta, where he got a bachelor’s degree in medical science, they divorced. But they had long been united in wanting their son to study medicine. In his 20s, Dr. Poon was briefly a standup comedian. Back then, before “heightened cultural sensitivity,” he said, he used to tell a joke about the medical exam being the Asian bar mitzvah.

In 2021, two years after completing his family medicine residency at Toronto Western Hospital, he earned a master’s degree in public health at Columbia. Last year, he finished a public health and preventive medicine residency at the University of Toronto and became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada. He is now working toward a master of studies in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy at Oxford and expects to graduate next year.

He also has two jobs. By day, Dr. Poon is a medical health officer for Northern Medical Services in Saskatchewan, where his hours are mostly virtual because commuting requires a flight plus an hourslong drive. At night, he is a general practitioner psychotherapist at Toronto’s Comprehensive Treatment Clinic, specializing in addictions, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety.

In the early 2000s, Ms. Aquino’s mother had immigrated to Ireland from the Philippines as a nurse. She successfully petitioned to have her daughter, then 5, and husband join her. Ms. Aquino’s father died of cancer less than a year later. “She was a widow at 28 and provided as much as she could with the cards she was dealt,” Ms. Aquino said.

Ms. Aquino graduated from University College Dublin with a bachelor’s degree in nursing. She later earned a master’s degree in marketing from King’s College London. In Toronto, where she now lives with Dr. Poon, she works as a disability case manager at Manulife, an insurance company.