Jonathan Raven Otcasek and Erin Minji Kim met at the center of the world. It was September 2014, their junior semester of college while studying abroad in London, and they were on a class outing to Greenwich, England — a town on London’s outskirts where the Prime Meridian, point 0.0 in the longitudinal system, passes through.

Mr. Otcasek noticed the words imprinted on Ms. Kim’s gray T-shirt: “Who needs a boyfriend when you have a record collection?” An avid music fan whose late father, Ric Ocasek, was the songwriter, rhythm guitarist and lead singer of the new wave band the Cars, Mr. Otcasek (who kept the silent “t” that his father had removed from the original Czech spelling of their surname) quickly deduced two important pieces of intelligence: Ms. Kim was single, and she liked music.

He had found his opening: “Hey, doesn’t that building look like the power station on the cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Animals’?” he asked, pointing toward the Greenwich Power Station across the River Thames. Except Ms. Kim had never heard of the record.

So Mr. Otcasek did what any serious courter would do: He pulled up an image of it on his phone while Ms. Kim stood there, awkward and amused.

Turned out he was sort of right (the building on the “Animals” cover was actually Battersea Power Station), but the conversation trailed off. The next day, on a group tour of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Ms. Kim overheard Mr. Otcasek, discussing Starship Titanic, a computer game designed by Douglas Adams, author of the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Ms. Kim, a huge fan of Mr. Adams, had never met anyone who had ever played it, let alone knew of it.

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