Ariana Silvestro, a founder and chief executive of the fragrance company Scent Lab, spoke from the heart in 2018 when she told Nicholas Austin Kluender she thought they should revisit feelings they started exploring two years earlier.
“I was straight up with him,” said Ms. Silvestro, who was then working as a senior strategy associate at the urgent care company CityMD in Midtown Manhattan. “I said, ‘Hey, I feel like we never really gave this a chance.’” Mr. Kluender, now the senior director for finance at CityMD, was ready to pick up where they had left off.
Ms. Silvestro and Mr. Kluender met at CityMD in June 2016, but didn’t get to know each other until the end of that year, when Mr. Kluender, then an analyst, struck up a conversation with her at the company’s holiday party. He knew Ms. Silvestro had previously worked as a store manager at Bath & Body Works. His mother had also worked at one of the chain’s stores near his hometown, Seaford, N.Y.
“He was wondering if we had ever worked together,” Ms. Silvestro said. “He seemed so nice.”
So nice, in fact, that she hatched a plan while they chatted at the party to set him up with one of her roommates in Astoria, Queens. Dating each other felt like a bad idea to both. “We were starting our careers,” Mr. Kluender said. Neither wanted to navigate the fuzzy rules around an office romance.
But that night, Mr. Kluender, who was living with his parents in Seaford, ended up at her Astoria apartment. And not with Ms. Silvestro’s roommate. “We did have a first kiss that night,” Ms. Silvestro said.
Ms. Silvestro, 30, grew up in Plainview, N.Y. She has a bachelor’s in philosophy from St. John’s University. Mr. Kluender, 32, has a bachelor’s in business management from Farmingdale State College.
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