Melissa Lee and Skylar Richard Gibson met on June 1, 2021, on the stairs of a Lower East Side walk-up, into which they were each moving separately.
“I will never forget her first words to me,” Mr. Gibson said. “I had already bumped into her roommates. So, when I saw her, I said, ‘You must be Mel.’ And she said, ‘My name is Melissa. Only my friends call me Mel.’”
Despite the lackluster meeting, and “with his tail between his legs,” he said, he invited her and her roommates over to his move-in party. They stopped by, but, Ms. Lee said, “It was the first time since Covid being with more than two or three people. I came back and said to my mom, ‘I never need to go to another party.’”
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Although Mr. Gibson thought she was attractive, he said, “I don’t think she had any intention of seeing me again.”
But they did see each other again, thanks to an issue with pest control in their building. “They would have a cockroach and ask, ‘Can you come down and kill it?’” Mr. Gibson said. “One day, I had gotten a Levain cookie. I put it in the microwave and the text came. I had to choose between the cookie and the cockroach.” He chose the cockroach.
But later that July, Ms. Lee and her roommates had a different ask of Mr. Gibson. Mr. Gibson’s apartment was on the top floor and had rooftop access, and Ms. Lee and her roommate were hoping to enjoy the view. “She and her roommate invited themselves over,” he said. They finally had a chance to talk and hit it off. The next day, Ms. Lee texted him and asked if he wanted to go for a walk. He happily agreed.
He needed to pick up some guitar strings and asked if she was up for a 30-minute walk to Guitar Center. As they strolled, Ms. Lee said, “I remember walking through Union Square Park and hearing a street artist play ‘My Funny Valentine.’”
From perusing his social media accounts, Ms. Lee knew Mr. Gibson was a talented musician. But at the Guitar Center, “I feigned ignorance as he approached the keyboards,” Ms. Lee said. “As I sat beside him, he played Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pas De Deux,’ a piece I grew up listening to every year as a former ballerina.”
Because she was having such a good time, Ms. Lee suggested dinner, and they ended up at Thursday Kitchen, where Mr. Gibson, who was caught up in the moment, accidentally left the guitar strings behind.
They ended the evening on his rooftop. “It was one of those 12-hour dates,” Ms. Lee said. Neither of them wanted it to end. But when they finally called it a night, Ms. Lee said, “I walked back down to my apartment and texted my friends that I had met my future husband.”
Five days later, both tested positive for Covid. “We quarantined together for five straight days,” Ms. Lee said. “We hung out that first time and have been together ever since.” By September, they made their relationship official.
In October 2021, they took their first trip together to Italy. It was Mr. Gibson’s first time overseas. It was also the first time that Mr. Gibson told Ms. Lee that he loved her. “Skylar said ‘I love you’ at my favorite spot, watching the sun set in Florence,” Ms. Lee said. “I told him I felt the same way.”
In June 2023, the two moved in together into an apartment in the East Village, where they continue to live.
Ms. Lee, 30, who was born and raised in Dublin, Ohio, is a team lead in TikTok’s beauty division and earned a bachelor’s degree in public policy at Duke, where she was a Division I cheerleader. She took summer intensives with the American Ballet Theater and BalletMet and is a founder of the New York Asian Film Festival Associate Council, as well as a leader of the event planning committee for PEN America’s Young Patrons.
Mr. Gibson, 28, is a senior associate in private equity at Blue Wolf Capital. He holds a bachelor’s in finance from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. He was born and raised in Topanga, Calif., and is a classically trained pianist. He is currently producing his first album, an experimentation with electronic dance music.
The couple married on Aug. 16 at the Henson, a hotel in Hensonville, N.Y. The outdoor ceremony, attended by 85 guests, was led by Derek Goldstein, a college friend of the groom who was ordained by the Universal Life Church for the occasion.
They had been engaged since June 2024, when on a morning walk to the lighthouse in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. Gibson surprised Ms. Lee — or so he thought — with a proposal. “I thought I was being super sly,” he said. But she already had a hunch. “I found out later that she even wrote in her journal, ‘Today’s the day I’m going to get engaged.’”
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