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November 7, 2025
Houston, TX

Zoë & Joe

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Zoë Crain

and

Joe Scalora

November 7, 2025

Houston, TX
108 days108 d20 hours20 h38 minutes38 min47 seconds47 s

Our Story - Zoë's Version

After graduating from college in 2019, I moved to Houston, Texas to begin working at NASA. On my first day, I walked into the group Monday meeting and saw Joe across the room. He was the first person I noticed, and I thought to myself “oh man. I am going to end up liking this guy.” And I did! I pretty much had eyes for Joe from that moment on. I told my friends about him very quickly and they knew that I had a crush on one of my coworkers. But, since we were working together, I knew that the stakes were pretty high. For a year, nothing happened and we just got to know each other organically through work and soccer. I liked him more and more as time went on and by the summer of 2020, I’d say we were solid friends. We talked more during work hours (we were remote due to COVID, so lots of instant messaging and a few calls here and there) and I would hang back after soccer to talk to him after games, really subtly. I remember there was one afternoon he cold called me just to chat, and it was the first time I really let myself think he might say yes if I asked him out. We had expanded our interactions to other (soccer related) things - Joe drove 25 minutes to a park close to the apartment I lived in at the time so we could kick a soccer ball around. In hindsight, I should have read into this more, but we were both keeping things very close to the chest. Meanwhile this whole time I am bemoaning to my friends how much I like him but I’m afraid of what happens if I tell him and he doesn’t like me back. Months and months of agonizing over this and I got to the point where I knew I had to say something because it was making me crazy. Plus, since we were working remotely, if I made a fool of myself it would be fairly easy to avoid him while the dust settled. So I told my friends it was time and one Wednesday in October 2020 I got into my car to go home after talking to Joe after our soccer game. I had thought I was going to say something to him and I’d chickened out. I was in the car with the door shut when I basically thought to myself “get it together.” I opened the door, speed-walked across the parking lot to him, and said: “you don’t have to say anything back to me and I won’t be upset if you don’t feel the same. But I like you, and really like you, and it isn’t going to go away because it hasn’t for awhile. And I just need you to know that.” Joe, meanwhile, was standing with the front door of his car open because I’d caught him off guard. The alarm was going off every 30 seconds or so while I bared my soul. I have continued to poke fun at him about this to this day. Anyway, Joe said “well I think we should go on a date. And also I think you’re very pretty.” Which I handled like a champ and didn’t get butterflies about or blush really hard in the moment or anything. And the rest is history! We went on dates for a couple months until late December when Joe was getting ready to go home for Christmas. We were on the couch talking about what the holidays were like in New Jersey and I can’t remember exactly how we got to it, but Joe said something along the lines of “well I have to be able to talk about you to my family as my girlfriend,” and I said “oh, am I your girlfriend?” And he said “if that’s what you want to be?” To which I had to play it cool like that’s not what I’d been thinking about for over a year. Incidentally I did not play it cool, and I said “yeah obviously that’s what I want” WAYYY too fast. 4 years later almost to the day, Joe took me back to the soccer fields for a standard Wednesday game. But instead of playing the game that night, he asked me to marry him standing in the same place everything had started. It was full circle and the perfect way to kick off the next chapter of our lives together.

Our Story - Joe's Version

My first impression of Zoë was… she’s a girl, I should ask her if she plays soccer! That was all of the non-work thoughts about Zoë I allowed myself to have. Most of you know that Zoë and I met at work, but I bet only a few of you know that I was actually her assigned mentor for her first ~year at NASA. As a result, I got to know Zoë better than I would’ve otherwise, but I also wanted to be respectful of our professional relationship over any potential personal one. Zoë will testify… I can compartmentalize with the best of them. After a year of playing soccer and talking often at work, Zoë and I were solid friends. Who knows what might have happened to the both of us had the world not been turned upside down. Zoë destroyed her ankle in an indoor gym bouldering accident and was hospitalized. I thought I should give her a call while she was in the hospital… as a friend. We mostly talked about how much our soccer team would miss her and about how gruesome her injury was. Shortly after, the pandemic shuttered all of our soccer leagues anyway. COVID was weird though. Humans are weird. In many ways, a lot of people were brought closer together by previously secondary or tertiary forms of communication. All of a sudden, the digital work-relationship that Zoë and I had, became really important. It was bubbling up to something. By the time we started playing soccer again, I felt like we couldn’t get the same things out of our limited in-person time as we could remotely. So, naturally, we started to slowly lengthen the amount of time we’d spend together. I call this phase of our lives; micro-dating. Zoë does not approve of the term, but this is MY section. Some of our micro-dates included, staying later after soccer to let Zoë french braid my hair. Seriously, I let her mess with my hair! At least twice, we kicked the ball around at a park near her place down by work. I played plenty of soccer during the week… micro-date. It all culminated in Zoë confessing her feelings towards me in the parking lot of our Wednesday soccer league, but I’m sure she’ll write all about that. On our first date, we walked to my favorite pizza place, which shares a space with a very good hammock bar. Halfway there, I realized I forgot a mask and we needed to turn back to grab it. To this day, I will joke that it was Zoë who forgot the mask and made us turn back. That doesn’t sound like a very funny joke, but trust me, it’s hilarious. Our first couple dates were very chill and, you might say, no different than two good friends hanging out. As co-workers, I maintained very mindful of the potential ramifications of our relationship not working. I knew, in the coldest and most logical sense, that I would only be willing to take the next steps if I had reasonable confidence that Zoë was forever. It only took her two months to impress upon me that I shouldn’t let her go. My story since we started dating has happily been our story. I can’t wait for you all, our closest friends and family, to share the Wedding chapter in our story. To be followed by many many more happy chapters.

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