Ross Carl Scarano’s career in journalism took off before he had a chance to explore his dream of writing fiction professionally. But knowing how to express himself on the page served him well in September 2019, when he set down words to repair his broken relationship with Nina Lee.
“There are still times I go back and reread it,” Ms. Lee said of the email he sent her two months after severing their romance. At the time, she had felt her world cave in. “I was reeling. I was trying so hard to get over it.”
Ms. Lee and Mr. Scarano met on Jan. 28, 2018, at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards, held that year at Madison Square Garden. Ms. Lee, now the head of public relations and communications at Darkroom Records, was then a music publicist at Shore Fire Media. Mr. Scarano, now the editorial director of the entertainment company Complex and a freelance writer (who occasionally contributes to this paper), was then the vice president of content at Billboard magazine.
When Ms. Lee handed Mr. Scarano a business card, he was too deep in what he called “shaking hands and kissing babies” mode to register an attraction. “I was there for work, and I hadn’t been in the job that long, and I was feeling a lot of pressure to meet as many people in the music industry as I could,” he said.
He kept the card, though, and in a bid to demonstrate it was no empty gesture, he emailed her the next day. A plan to meet for drinks and talk about Billboard’s coverage of her clients, which included the R&B artists Maxwell and Robert Randolph, took shape a few weeks later, in mid-February.
At Night of Joy, a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Ms. Lee arrived with a hard out in case the conversation stalled. “I had an artist playing at Brooklyn Steel, so I had an excuse to leave,” she said. But when she departed two drinks later, it wasn’t because she and Mr. Scarano had run out of things to talk about. “I remember meeting up with my roommate afterward and being like, ‘I have a crush,’” she said.
Ms. Lee, 32, was born in São Paulo, Brazil. Her parents, Kyoung Ae and Jong Kyu Lee, emigrated there from Seoul in the 1980s, and later moved with Ms. Lee and her older brother to Fullerton, Calif., where her younger sister was born.
After college at N.Y.U., where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and linguistics, she stayed in New York, finding internships that led to her first jobs in music publicity. Access to the Grammys provided little of the glamour her friends expected. “They would say, ‘What are you going to wear?’” she said. “I was like, ‘pants and flats.’ As a publicist, you’re running around the red carpet.”
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Mr. Scarano, 39, grew up in Murrysville, Pa., with a younger brother and their parents, Emil and Patricia Scarano. Literature and music made their mark early.
“When I was a kid, I would read my dad’s Stephen King book over his shoulder when he went out on the porch to smoke,” he said. “It felt a little illicit and transgressive to me. I was reading complicated things at a young age.”
He expected his bachelor’s degree in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh to launch him toward a career in teaching and developing his fiction. Instead, after graduation, he and a handful of college friends rented an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and he found work as an editorial assistant at Complex Media.
When he and Ms. Lee met at Night of Joy Bar, he didn’t leave with a crush the way she had. “Certainly, I think Nina is beautiful, and I clocked that,” he said. “But I just wasn’t thinking about it from that vantage point.”
Months passed before they met again. But social media kept them aware of each other. “He was definitely getting my press releases,” Ms. Lee said. “Finally we were like, we should hang out again.” In early summer, they had their first kiss at the social club Dumbo House.
By the start of 2019, they had fallen in love. But that summer, when Ms. Lee wondered aloud about Mr. Scarano’s level of commitment, he felt what he called “a cold-feet type of anxiety.”
“I wanted to be 100 percent in it” before making promises about a shared future, he said. “We weren’t at that point.” That July, he broke up with her. Then he spent weeks weighing his feelings against his fears. “I thought a lot about Nina. I had regrets about ending it, about not letting myself fully embrace things.” In September, he emptied his heart in the email she treasures.
“I couldn’t even focus,” she said, when it landed in her inbox while she was attending a WNYC press event in Manhattan. But losing focus to gain clarity about his feelings had been an easy trade. “I called my roommate on the way home, screaming.” The screaming came from shock and disbelief, she said. She was also overjoyed.
They had been fully reconciled for months when the pandemic roared in the following March, contributing to what was already shaping up to be a terrible year. In February, Mr. Scarano’s father had been diagnosed with lung cancer. When the couple traveled to Murrysville to visit in early March, masks and social distancing were still on the horizon.
But by the time they were due back in New York, the city was in lockdown. Instead of returning home, they holed up for 12 weeks in Mr. Scarano’s childhood bedroom.
“It was complicated because my dad was going through cancer treatments,” Mr. Scarano said. But his parents agreed they should stay. For Ms. Lee, “it could have felt like, ‘you shouldn’t be here.’ But it didn’t.”
In June 2021, Ms. Lee and Mr. Scarano moved into an apartment together in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Emil Scarano had died three months earlier, in March. The months they all spent under the same roof in 2020 didn’t diminish Mr. Scarano’s devastation, but “in memory, that time has taken on a different kind of glow,” he said.
Grieving helped them round a corner on their relationship, too — one that enabled more honest communication. “It brought up a lot of big emotions,” Ms. Lee said. She wanted to be supportive but didn’t always know how. And that was OK with Mr. Scarano. “There were times I didn’t know what I needed,” he said. “But I knew Nina was there for me, that I could count on her.”
Individual and couples counseling helped them arrive at the direction their lives took next. Before Mr. Scarano proposed in their apartment on Oct. 25, 2023, each had decided that having a baby felt more urgent than getting married. Friends were reporting a range of experiences about trying to conceive; for some, it happened fast, for others, it was a struggle. So at the beginning of January 2024, “it was like, let’s just start trying,” Mr. Scarano said.
On Nov. 30 of that year, they welcomed a son, Sailor.
During the pregnancy, figuring out a wedding took a back seat to figuring out the transition to becoming parents. But postpartum, when both were on leave from work, the planning picked up in earnest.
On March 28, Ms. Lee and Mr. Scarano, who now live in Crown Heights, were married at the Prospect Park Boathouse in Brooklyn. Their friend India Little, who had been previously ordained by the Universal Life Church, officiated.
Ms. Lee descended a dramatic staircase in a white Jenny Yoo tube dress before joining her father for a walk down the aisle. She felt a wave of nausea before she reached the altar. “I had big nerves,” she said. “I almost threw up.” The shot of tequila she and several friends took to tame them didn’t help.
But hearing Mr. Scarano’s handwritten vows centered her.
“The image I have in my head, we’re sitting beside each other on the couch, like I watched my parents do when they were that age and even older,” he read. “We’re holding hands and the room is quiet, it’s still. On the surface, nothing is happening. But of course that’s incorrect. Everything is happening; that’s our life.”
Their 121 guests got a sense of the breadth and richness of that life when Sailor, in a tuxedo, toddled down the aisle, accompanied by an older cousin to serve as ring bearer.
Mr. Scarano, who wore a bespoke suit from Atelier Saman Amel and a vintage Gucci tie he found on eBay, had been bracing himself for their 16-month-old son to wander astray. But “he was locked in,” he said. Minutes later, as they were pronounced married, they felt locked in, too. But not in something either could imagine wanting out of.
Ms. Lee and Mr. Scarano “are a melody and a harmony,” Ms. Little told the guests. “Separately, beautiful, but together, stronger.”
On This Day
When March 28, 2026
Where The Prospect Park Boathouse, Brooklyn
No Ordinary Love The couple’s knowledge of contemporary music was on display during their first dance at the reception. They chose the song “Lovers Rock,” by Sade. “It’s a bit of a deep cut, which appealed to the music snobs in us,” Mr. Scarano said. “But more importantly, the lyrics capture the sense of shelter a great love offers.”
Simple Great Taste Ms. Lee chose her wedding dress for its simplicity. “I didn’t want anything too princess-y,” she said. She kept her jewelry simple — her gold chain with an “R” for “Ross” on it is her everyday necklace. At the reception, she changed into a short dress from Vaquera, specially made for a bridal collection with Ssense. Mr. Scarano chose the dress and held onto it for more than a year before he gave it to her. She loved it. “Ross has great taste,” she said.
Seoul Sentimental Ms. Lee’s parents now split their time between Seoul and São Paulo, with frequent visits to the United States to see their grandchildren. For the wedding, her mother wore a traditional Korean hanbok dress. At the reception, she gave a speech in Korean that Ms. Lee’s sister translated for guests. “In many ways it was the emotional high point of the wedding,” Mr. Scarano said. “My dad was bawling, I was bawling,” Ms. Lee said.
Sweet and Spring-like A wedding cake made by Sid Starkman, known for her avant-garde creations, hinted at Ms. Lee’s passion for flowers, with an arrangement by their florist, Kabuki.NY.
Bookish In her handwritten vows, Ms. Lee referenced her husband’s literary side. “When Sail was a newborn, and I was in a deep postpartum haze, I told you I couldn’t focus enough to read or listen to an audiobook,” she said, “So you read pages of Tobias Wolff’s ‘This Boy’s Life’ to us every night while I was nursing Sail until we would both fall asleep. And now, Sailor’s favorite possessions are his books — just like his dad.”
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