Facebook’s Royal Wedding

PALO ALTO, Calif.

THE wedding of Mark Zuckerberg to Priscilla Chan last weekend here in the backyard of their $7 million home had all the staging of a carefully orchestrated celebrity event. A publicist for Facebook eagerly offered photos afterward of the beaming couple, who met at Harvard and have dated for much of the last nine years. Well-placed anonymous sources leaked to reporters the dinner menu, which included sushi and Mexican food, and the fact that Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong performed.

Even the date, May 19, was significant: it was a mere day after Facebook’s initial public stock offering, the culmination of Mr. Zuckerberg’s life work since founding the social network in his Harvard dorm room in 2004. But the curiosity that lingered was not just about what designer’s dress the bride chose to wear (Claire Pettibone) or how long it would take shareholders to sue Facebook for bungling its IPO (six days). Instead, people wanted to know: who was that princess bride who married Silicon Valley’s crown prince?

Indeed, to anyone who still confuses Mr. Zuckerberg with the portrayal of him in “The Social Network,” particularly the scene where his former girlfriend brushes him off (and the prospects of any future romance for young Mark seem dim), the very fact that he even had a longtime girlfriend must have come as something of a shock.

Ms. Chan, 27, unlike some of her equals in social status here (among them Mr. Zuckerberg’s colorful sister Randi), eschews the Silicon Valley limelight. Recently graduated from the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, she plans to become a pediatrician. (In that, she seems to be following in the path of other notable Silicon Valley spouses who have their own established careers, like Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs and an entrepreneur in her own right, and Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google’s Sergey Brin and a founder of 23andMe, a genetic testing firm.)

Ms. Chan guards her privacy and, so far, avoids speaking to the media unless it serves Mr. Zuckerberg’s career. Though she has an active Facebook page (where her “interests” include “No on Prop 8” and Fage yogurt), she is rarely tagged in online party shots. She declined to be interviewed for this article.