Tiffany + Yuriy — Portrait of a Young Couple

Tiffany + Yuriy // Queens, New York

Here is the Disney summary of Tiffany and Yuriy’s love story, as written on their wedding website:

Once upon a time, there was a baby girl born to a newlywed Filipino mother and a Dominican father living in the world's most famous concrete jungle--New York City. Nine months later, across a vast ocean and half a world away, a baby boy was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan to a newlywed Bukharian-Jewish couple. Seven years later these babies would meet as young children, and grow up to fall in love--never knowing that they were destined to build a life together.
Yuriy and Tiffany both hail from Queens, New York City. They also went to the same junior high, high school, and college--but were never in the same class. Yuriy was introduced to Tiffany who was at the time best friends with his first cousin. Yuriy recalls it was not until Tiffany sang at a family Bat Mitz Vah that he began to see her as more than just another one of his cousin's best friends. "She was up there alone, obviously nervous. And despite her vulnerability, she still managed to shine through and sing her heart out.”
Yuriy proposed to Tiffany in the last ten seconds of December 31, 2017, underneath the Dallas Reunion Tower (because 2017 was the year they were reunited after an almost decade long hiatus). Yuriy timed it so perfectly that when Tiffany said, "Yes!" at the stroke of midnight, fireworks erupted from the Reunion Tower--to which Yuriy said, "Look, baby. All of Dallas is celebrating our engagement…”

This story is beautiful, inspiring, and true.

It’s also entirely incomplete.

To tell Tiffany and Yuriy’s story is to tell all of it, and to understand even a modicum of the happiness they felt on their wedding day is to understand not just their bliss, but also their anguish.

As children, Yuriy grew up in a neighborhood with poverty, drugs, and violence, while Tiffany grew up in a home with discrimination, neglect, and abuse.

As teenagers, they comforted one another while also leaving wounds through their actions and words that persisted for the next decade.

*Yuriy and Tiffany together soon after they first started dating at age 13*

As young adults, they never caught their breaths; high school ended in depressive turmoil, college a maelstrom of emotional and physical exhaustion, and life was many things but never straightforward.

And as an engaged couple, with just a few weeks before their wedding in September 2019, they rushed to the hospital, with Yuriy unable to breathe and unclear as to why. When Yuriy was discharged two weeks later, he and Tiffany decided to postpone their wedding to March of 2020.

Towards the end of the week leading up to their rescheduled wedding, I admitted to Tiffany and Yuriy that I was not only physically but also emotionally exhausted from our time together. We had exchanged so many stories, of so many emotions, in so little a time, that I struggled to find a thread in their lives that was yet unfrayed. Nothing felt as confusing and contradictory as the human heart and mind.

Tiffany said something that I won’t soon forget: “We’re always making our decisions based on very limited information in a very limited amount of time. The best we can do is follow our hearts, even when that doesn’t always lead to decisions aligned with our ideals.”

“When I think about the beginning of my life, and the beginning of love, they both start with Yuriy. He was where everything began for me; the first person who made me feel strong and comfortable, and who protected me. I had already accepted, 10 years after we broke up, that we would never be together. But I also knew that, in some parallel universe, we were supposed to be.”

“Some parallel universe” turned out to be this universe. As Yuriy put it, “We’re going to make the best of it, and when we stumble and fall, we’ll have each other, no matter what.”

After 20 years, they’d finally made it.

Tiffany and Yuriy met as kids through Yuriy’s cousin and Tiffany’s best friend Svetlana. The two got to know each other at family parties or when Tiffany and Svetlana would hang out, and they started dating around middle school.

*Svetlana’s husband Boris, Svetlana, Yuriy, and Tiffany at the wedding. Svetlana is holding a picture of her and Yuriy as kids*

Their relationship was serious from the start. Tiffany’s home life was often abusive and neglectful; she started running away when she was nine years old and would often miss meals or show up to school with bruises. Each night, Yuriy used his allowance to help Tiffany buy food and then accompany her to various relatives’ or friends’ houses. When Tiffany couldn’t find anywhere else to stay, Yuriy would sneak her into his own home.

Yuriy showed me Tiffany’s route one night during dinner at his childhood home. “She would run through the bushes in someone else’s yard, hop the fence, come in through the back door when no one was around, and sneak down into the basement,” he told me. “We’d sleep there together on a pull out bed, and when my parents suspected something, Tiffany would hide near the boiler, where it was warm, until they were gone.”

*Yuriy showing where Tiffany used to hide in his house. Near the boiler was the warmest spot*

Yuriy used to do competitive Judo as a teenager; he was so good that he once received a call from Vladimir Putin—an avid judo practitioner—congratulating him on a tournament win. He was an excellent fighter, but his tough exterior cloaked a softer, more delicate interior. “Yuriy was a gentleman from the beginning,” Tiffany told me. “He always asked permission to hold my hand, or kiss me on the cheek.”

His kindness was an enormous support for Tiffany, and also a source of guilt that she was ruining his life from the stress. Yuriy admitted that helping Tiffany was often overwhelming. “I had to mature in a way that I wasn’t ready for at the time, thinking back on it,” he said. “But I did the best I could to try to be there for her, because it broke my heart every time I thought about it; that she was going through all that stuff, when everyone else I knew was ‘happy-go-lucky’ going through their childhood.”

Tiffany grew up with the idea (“My Filipino mom instilled Catholic guilt into me”) that whomever she “fell in love with” as a kid would become the person she married and loved forever. She worried about falling in love with someone who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, love her back, and so she confronted Yuriy; his parents, for religious and cultural reasons, would never approve of her.

“We’d only been dating for a month, and I was crying so hard because I didn’t think that I could be with him forever,” Tiffany said. “So I told Yuriy, ‘I think we should break up, because I know the truth: you can’t marry me at the end of the day, so what’s the point of dating? It’s not like you love me.’”

Tiffany giggled as she recalled how he responded. “I bet he regrets saying it now: ‘But Tiffany, I do love you.’ And that was a bomb! I was like… ‘Somebody loves me!’ ”

*Tiffany and Yuriy being lifted during the Horah, a tradition at many Jewish weddings*

When I asked Yuriy if he’d just said something in the moment to avoid breaking up, he had a quick answer. “It wasn’t just that. Sure, part of me was like, ‘Yo, this is a lot harder than I signed up for.’ But I cared for her very deeply. Every time I reflected on all the things she was going through and how awesome she was, I wanted to be the one to care for her in a way she really deserved. So when she said ‘it’s not like you love me,’ I said that I did. Why else would I be there?”

Yuriy did, however, have doubts. Two years into dating Tiffany, Yuriy’s emotions were weighing heavily on him. His parents had found out about the relationship, and were exceptionally against it. “Every time they caught me on the phone with her, I’d get a whole bunch of shit from them,” Yuriy recalled.

Tiffany and Yuriy were also fighting more often, late into the hours of the night, and eventually he broke; Yuriy felt that he couldn’t sustain the relationship anymore, that he couldn’t give Tiffany the long-term stability and maturity she was asking for. His relationship with his parents, once strong, was disintegrating.

Yuriy’s parents shortly before the “Dance of the Golden Robes,” a Bukharian tradition where family pass a set of beautiful embroidered robes called “chapan” from person to person while dancing to traditional Bukharian music

The two broke up. “My spirit was in this relationship, but my heart and mind were breaking every day,” Yuriy said.

Yuriy’s parents, Ella and Rubin, are both Bukharian Jews, a group of people whose name derives from Bukhara, a city in present-day western Uzbekistan. “No one’s really certain exactly how our people got there,” Yuriy explained, “but the theory is that we’re one of the lost tribes of Israel, and that we just kept going east.” Ella and Rubin were born in the Soviet Union in the mid 1960’s, met in their 20’s, and were married after just a few dates.

*Yuriy and his parents when he was a baby in Uzbekistan*

Type “Bukharian” (pronounced boo-har-ee-an) into a text editor, and spell check will think you’ve made a mistake. “Sometimes, I’ll meet people from Tashkent,”—where Yuriy was born—“and they won’t even know there were Jews there. Our people have always been under the radar.”

*Example of iPhone spell check not knowing “Bukharian”*

In the early 1990’s, as the Soviet Union collapsed and Uzbekistan became an independent state, fear spread among Jews there that Islamic fundamentalism would soon threaten their lives. What followed was a mass exodus of the community to Israel and the United States, leaving only a few dozen families still in Uzbekistan today. In the US, the vast majority of Bukharians settled in Queens, NYC. Yuriy’s parents were among these immigrants, and moved to the US when he was two years old.

Yuriy and his parents first lived with 12 other extended family members in a multi-bedroom apartment. When that proved too crowded, they moved to an apartment complex called Lefrak City, located on the border of the Corona and Rego Park neighborhoods in Queens. As we drove past the massive complex one afternoon, Yuriy recalled the area being rough, with drugs ever-present and shootings a common sound. He was also bullied for being one of the only light-skinned people—he doesn’t consider himself white—in the area.

*Lefrak City from across the freeway, and from Google Maps, where you can better appreciate the size of the complex*

In the Soviet Union, Yuriy’s mom, Ella, had already completed her education to become a nurse, but when she immigrated to the US she was told to repeat her education to get licensed. Without the privilege of a second opinion, she enrolled in a two-year program, only to find out later that she could’ve just taken an exam without going back to school. “She got straight A’s with zero English,” Yuriy told me.

At the same time, Yuriy’s dad, Rubin, opened a food cart in Queens as a quick way to start earning money. The gig was only supposed to be temporary, but Rubin still operates the cart today, 25+ years later, near the Queens Criminal Courthouse.

*An old photo of Yuriy’s father (in the striped shirt) at his food cart*

*A photo we took at Rubin’s food cart. He’s been in the same spot for over two decades.*

The family’s first years in the US were financially unsustainable (Rubin made as little as $25 a day from the food cart) but a few years after Ella started working as a nurse, they managed to save enough to buy a home in the nicer neighborhood of Fresh Meadows. They still live there today.

*Yuriy with his parents in front of their home in Fresh Meadows. You can see the food cart parked in the background*

Yuriy remembers a mostly happy childhood. His parents loved him, and though they never had extra, they had what they needed. He learned early to value money and hard work. “I would work with my dad at the food cart in the summer,” he told me, “and we had this little deal where after three o’clock, I’d get to keep the money for whatever soda was sold.” His parents worked hard to ensure Yuriy would have a good future, which in their minds meant specific things: a Bukharian wife, kids, a good job, and close family and religious ties.

Ella and Rubin were prepared to raise a child, and treated the responsibility seriously and with intention. They instilled in Yuriy the importance of community, and how for millennia the only way to survive as a Jew in parts of the world was to maintain close relations with people from your own culture. Someone who shared your religion and way of life was someone you could trust.

But Yuriy didn’t think the same way; he grew up in the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural borough of Queens, not somewhere where Jews were outright targeted and ostracized; keeping relations with others in his community was a source of comfort rather than a means of survival.

On a drive one day through Yuriy’s old neighborhoods near Lefrak City, Yuriy pointed out at least five times when he saw someone from his community whom he recognized. “It’s just that kind of neighborhood,” he mused. We passed most without saying hi.

*On a walk in front of one of Yuriy’s old schools. Lefrak City is in the background, across the freeway*

Queens, one of New York City’s five boroughs, is among the most diverse places on the planet. According to US census data, there’s a 76% chance when picking two of its residents at random that they will come from different ethnic backgrounds, and Tiffany likes to say that her parents, who are Dominican and Filipino, couldn’t have met anywhere else. The borough is also home to the only major US population of Bukharian Jews.

Queens is not, however, homogeneously diverse. Its neighborhoods hosting enclaves of different peoples and cultures: Chinese communities congregate in Flushing, Colombian families in Jackson Heights, Jewish residents in Kew Garden. I-495, known colloquially as the Long Island Expressway or LIE, connects many of these neighborhoods, cutting across the northern half of the borough and connecting Manhattan to the west and Long Island to the east.

The expressway is always crowded and full of people cutting one another off. (I, perhaps because of a gentler Oklahoman upbringing, dubbed it “strategic merging,” and was more fearful for myself than I was mad at others when they came shockingly close to me.)

I wish I had my own dashcam footage to show all the close calls I had with people cutting me off, but this at least represents some of the normal driving. Lefrak City is visible at 7:00

As Tiffany, Yuriy, and I drove through Queens, running wedding errands or grabbing food together, I began to recognize roads and neighborhoods. Yuriy took note. “See, I didn’t even tell him to turn anymore. This man knows where he’s going!” he said one day as I drove us through their old neighborhoods. It felt great to go from complete stranger to competent traveler in a week.

*Yuriy and Tiffany in front of the iconic Unisphere, located in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, and one of the many landmarks I used to navigate through the borough*

It also reminded me, though, of how little I knew about the area compared to Tiffany and Yuriy, who’d spent decades crossing back and forth across the borough. As we drove, Tiffany and Yuriy pointed out places of significance in their story: old elementary schools, their favorite handball courts, the shopping center where they once got into a bit of trouble. I couldn't help but wonder about the other memories I would never hear about.

One sunny afternoon, we visited a mall where Tiffany and Yuriy spent a lot of time as kids; we were picking out a red tie to go with Yuriy’s blue wedding suit. As we walked past the food court, Tiffany pointed out the Sarku, a Japanese chain. “No way, it’s still here?!” she said excitedly. “Yuriy and I used to save up change to buy the chicken from this place when we were kids. It was the best chicken ever.”

A man was handing out samples. Tiffany plucked a toothpick of teriyaki chicken from the tray and popped it into her mouth. “It doesn’t taste as good as I remember.” She paused for a moment. “Which, honestly, is probably a good thing.”

Tiffany and Yuriy’s first breakup didn’t last long. Yuriy, out of guilt that Tiffany should still have someone to take care of her, even if it wasn’t him, set her up with an acquaintance who was head-over-heels in love with Tiffany. That relationship didn’t last long though, and just a few months later, Tiffany and Yuriy were together again.

Their next breakup would be for a decade.

After dating for another two years, Yuriy was now a junior in high school, and Tiffany a senior, thinking about what college and her life after it might look like. The future with Yuriy that Tiffany couldn’t imagine years before was now the present that she still couldn’t imagine. “I didn’t want to tear him away from his family, but I also didn’t want to go to college in New York,” Tiffany said. “So what could I do?”

Their relationship was also still a secret to Yuriy’s parents (Yuriy hadn’t told them he and Tiffany were together again) and Tiffany was still experiencing abuse in her home life. “I felt like a burden to him in all senses of the word because I couldn't even be a normal girlfriend. I was dealing with abuse on the daily, so if I wasn't running away, or didn’t have bruises all over me, then I wasn’t eating. Yuriy would be there through that, but I just felt like the worst person for him, and didn’t feel like I had anything good to offer.” Tiffany wanted to be with Yuriy, but she also wanted to remove him from what she perceived as the burden that was taking care of and being with her.

*An old photo of Yuriy and Tiffany in high school*

She hatched a plan to break up with Yuriy while staying friends with him by means of a rebound relationship with a classmate, whom I’ll call Jeffrey. Jeffrey would be leaving a few months after graduation for a Mormon mission trip, which would keep Tiffany from getting into anything too serious. Those few months would be enough for Yuriy to finally get over Tiffany, and the two would naturally part ways once Tiffany went to college. Yuriy would then be willing to try a relationship with someone who was Bukharian, making his family happy, and though he and Tiffany would part on difficult terms, they’d be able to look back on their relationship with gratitude rather than bitterness.

Of course, none of that actually happened.

The night before Tiffany planned to break up with Yuriy, she was on the phone with him, talking, fighting, making up, and falling asleep late into the night. She went to school exhausted the next day and, after school, fell asleep at a friend’s house while waiting for Yuriy to get out of school so she could break up with him.

When she woke up, it was to the feeling of Jeffrey kissing her.

“I panicked and started crying. I was supposed to break up with Yuriy that day, but now I’m going to see him with another man’s lips on me??” Tiffany recalled. Her friend (who later turned out to be secretly into Yuriy) suggested that Tiffany tell Yuriy the truth: she had cheated on him.

Tiffany was dumbfounded; she’d been asleep when Jeffrey kissed her. How could she have cheated? But her friend continued. “You need to use this to your advantage. You need to hurt him so much that he’ll never look at you again, that he won’t think twice about the breakup. Otherwise, he’ll never get over you.”

There was some truth to her friend’s words, so Tiffany followed the advice. “It was in a Burger King, of all fucking places,” Yuriy recalled. He was in shambles afterwards, and was hit by a car after being so distracted that he didn’t notice it coming down the street at a crosswalk. “I think I ended up sustaining a concussion, but I basically just got on the bus and went home,” Yuriy said. “I didn’t pay any mind because I was so distraught about what had just happened.”

He sank into a bad depression after that, nearly failing out of school and crying all the time, trying to think of ways to win Tiffany back.

Tiffany proceeded to enter a relationship with Jeffrey, but his supposed mission trip never materialized and, lacking the heart to cut Yuriy entirely out of her life, Tiffany kept him in it. For almost a year after their breakup, she continued to text him and lean on him for emotional support.

As his friends steadily convinced him that Tiffany was just using him at this point, Yuriy began to move on in earnest. He was talking to someone who seemed really sweet, attended the same school, and had the same friends, and finally told Tiffany that he didn’t want to be a part of this strange triangle with Jeffrey anymore.

“The very next day, she breaks up with Jeffrey, and I’m just left thinking: what kind of mind-fuckery is happening?” Yuriy said, exasperated even now. “I’m at a crossroads now in my life. On one hand, I’m talking to somebody new, someone who seems nice. On the other, I have Tiffany, who at this point I feel has been using me for a whole year to be emotionally supportive, saying I’m not the person with whom she needs to be.”

“My love turned to hatred. I couldn’t stand her anymore.”

Tiffany and Yuriy stopped talking after that, for a whole 10 years. She ended up having to stay in NYC for college, and their paths bumped but never quite crossed. One time, they happened to be in the same shift for a call center job at Dish Network (“I saw her from behind and was like, are you kidding me right now?”), and another time they ran into each other while crossing the same intersection. (“Vincent, have you ever had your heart go straight from 0 to 100 before?,” Tiffany screamed as we drove past the same intersection one afternoon.) Yuriy even had a friend from work who ended up dating Tiffany later on.

“We had one rule: You do not talk about Tiffany.”

Tiffany always valued her education, and credited much of why to her Filipino background. Her grandmother was a dentist and her grandfather a Supreme Court justice back in the Philippines, and her many aunts and uncles talked constantly about the importance of education.

But she also had a more personal reason to study hard: “I knew that if I didn’t do well in school, and was suffering at home, I’d never make it in life.”

*Tiffany making campaign materials for a student council president election. (She won.)*

After her painful breakup with Yuriy, Tiffany began taking classes at Queens College CUNY. For a short time, she was enchanted by university for the same reasons many young people are: the freedom, the classes, the fun. But because she had no financial help paying for it from her parents—her dad’s income disqualified her from receiving financial aid, and he insisted she just get married or go straight to work—Tiffany began working multiple jobs to pay for tuition, rent, and other necessities.

After six years of this, she felt no closer to her degree. The school kept adding more classes she’d need to graduate, classes she often couldn’t mesh with her work schedule. She started looking for an alternative.

“I kept hearing about people out of state with these big houses, and I did my research and found out that the cost of living in Dallas was much lower while still having an urban feel,” Tiffany told me. “It was also always a dream of mine to go out of state for school.” Transferring somewhere with a lower cost of living would allow her to both focus on school and save for the future.

Tiffany also had a more personal reason to leave. She not only needed space from her family, but from the thought of Yuriy, and what they could’ve been if circumstances were different and she hadn’t broken up with him. “I thought there was something mentally wrong with me that I still wasn’t over him,” Tiffany told me. “He was still someone that I dreamed about. Everything in New York felt like a ghost of how we used to be, where we should’ve been. I thought, maybe if I move, I’ll stop dreaming about him.”

Yuriy once said to me, “We have a saying in New York, that trying to get ahead is like trying to bite your elbow: It’s right in front of you, you can see it, you can imagine doing it. But it’ll never happen; it’ll always be just out of your reach.” For Tiffany, that not only applied to her financial or educational dreams, but the ones she had of Yuriy, too.

The same New York edge that some use to get ahead is also what holds others back. Rising costs of living without a proportional rise in wages have made envisioning a future—buying a house or raising kids—an ever-receding dream for both young people just starting their lives and older people who’ve lived and worked for decades with little economic progress to show for it. Those who don’t manage to catch a break in life, move away, or make fundamental changes to their lifestyle and career can just get stuck.

Where others wouldn’t have been bold enough to make the move, Tiffany was bold in abundance. Much of that likely came from her childhood, which Tiffany’s mom told me about one day over breakfast as we sat in her home watching the local news. “Even when she was just two or three years old, Tiffany was going up to the clerks at the airport and asking if she could help. She wasn’t scared the first time she flew by herself at age 5 on a trip from California to New York. My sisters and I used to even introduce Tiffany as our youngest sister.”

Tiffany’s mother grew up in the Philippines as one of eight children, and was incredibly ambitious and hardworking. After immigrating to New York City, she became a lab technologist at multiple hospitals in order to support her family. Tiffany’s father grew up in the Dominican Republic, and was in the Air Force before working with the Port Authority, fixing bridges and structures across New York and New Jersey.

The two met through her father’s brother, and were, at first, very happy to be together. They never, however, resolved their deeper cultural differences, which showed when they had kids; the way they thought about raising them, and about money and trust, was simply too different. Tiffany recalled being in the middle of it all. “My first job as a kid was as a mediator and translator for both my mom and dad.”

Tiffany was born as the only person on her mom’s side who wasn’t full Filipino. “I heard a lot of n****r baby and other slurs from that side of the family, and I didn’t understand why people were mean to me. It was confusing,” she told me. As she got older, and grew into many of the “Filipina stereotypes” her mother’s family liked—long, straight hair, good grades in school, and the unique ability among her cousins to speak Tagalog fluently—others began to accept her.

Being ostracized first, though, taught Tiffany to be bolder and more direct, perhaps more than she’d naturally like to be. “I would get really hurt when people would call me self-centered, or when they’d accuse me of wanting attention,” Tiffany said. She speaks her mind, and is one of the most enthusiastic people you’ll ever meet. On our first call, before we’d even discussed her own wedding, Tiffany asked whether I could photograph her friend’s wedding, too. “I really try to go above and out of my way to consider what other people are feeling and advocate for them,” she told me, “because I never really saw that happen in my own family.”

Her boldness has helped, though, propelling her to educational goals others would have long abandoned. After deciding to study Political Science in college, she learned how much she loved advocating for people. “Everyone I’ve ever researched who has accomplished all the things I’ve ever wanted to do in life started out with a law degree; anyone who’s ever wanted to contribute to their community, or make a change, has been empowered by the law.”

Micka, one of Tiffany’s best friends in Dallas, told me that she “is the type of person who will give her all to someone, or some cause.” When Tiffany found out that Micka wouldn’t be attending a pre-law trip her school had planned, Tiffany paid, with the money she earned from scholarships, for Micka to go because she didn’t want her to miss out on the opportunity. “We were both hard workers, and she was able to keep up with both my intense studying and my intense night outs. I love my fun, but I schedule my fun; Tiffany can keep up with that, and won’t get offended if I say I can’t go out, or that I need to study on my own instead of together.”

Where Tiffany’s boldness can hurt, though, is when it’s not directed towards you. “You can kinda just become part of her day,” one of her bridesmaids told me, not out of frustration but matter-of-factly. Her focus extended to not just large life goals, but also small tasks and cravings, like posting photos to social media or going to a very particular café, and it sometimes appears in the middle of conversations or meals as she types away intently on her phone.

While Tiffany moved to Texas, Yuriy stayed in New York. He had a self-described terrible time in college, working full-time four days a week and cramming school into the remaining three days.

He lived at home with his parents for cultural and financial reasons, and began fixing and rebuilding cars as a hobby, traveling across most of the United States in his 20’s looking for deals on old cars and motorcycles, and then bringing them back to New York to rebuild.

*Yuriy working on his motorcycle at home in Dallas*

Just as the breakup never really left Tiffany, it also never really left Yuriy, though in a much more negative way. “I got used to how things were with Tiffany, being completely candid with my partner,” he said. “We had a very serious relationship at a young age, and then she tore that out from under me. So the next person I dated, for nine years actually, we tiptoed around everything. Everything was taken with scrutiny, and suspicion, and I did it because I thought, ‘This is just how people behave when they get older.’ ”

I asked Yuriy why he had dated someone for nine years and yet hadn’t gotten married. “I never felt like she was my partner,” he replied. “After a while, she started feeling paranoid about every little thing, and our relationship became toxic. But I just kept trying to stay in it, because long-term, monogamous relationships were all I knew. If something was wrong, it was my fault, and I had to be the one to keep things together.”

“I thought, I guess life is just shitty, and you end up with someone you can mildly tolerate, and hope for the fucking best.”

The Friday before the wedding, Yuriy invited me to join his family and Tiffany for Shabbat dinner, which marks the start of the Jewish sabbath, in Yuriy’s childhood home. With Ella and Rubin both working long hours at the hospital and the food cart, Shabbat dinner was among a few times each week the entire family could spend time together.

The family’s large husky, Johnny, greeted me as I came in. “Does he speak Russian?” I asked while petting his thick coat of fur. “A little,” replied Yuriy. “He knows when my mom is scolding him” “He’s Jewish on Friday’s,” his sister added, showing me a picture of Johnny wearing a Kippah.

Dinner opened with a short reading from the Torah by Yuriy’s father. I could sense a mild tension in the room, perhaps capped by my presence as a relative stranger; Yuriy’s parents had only recently decided to attend the wedding again, after, as Yuriy said, disowning him over not breaking off his engagement with Tiffany. It seemed that the relationship was far from any sort of kumbaya peace. If I hadn’t known the history, though, I might’ve assumed everyone was just tired after a long week.

Yuriy’s family chimed in with stories to share with me. His mother talked about being forced into nursing by her own mother back in Uzbekistan (“I actually didn’t even know. She took my diploma from school, applied to nursing school for me, and told me to go study.”) His dad shared how they got their husky. (A friend hadn’t anticipated the work required, and gave the dog to Yuriy, who surprised the family one day with their new pet.) And his sister lamented about how painful it’d been that morning to get a hold of the utility company. (The duty of taking care of the house, originally Yuriy’s, had fallen on her when he moved to Dallas to be with Tiffany.)

*Tiffany sharing a funny photo during Shabbat dinner a few days before the wedding*

After dinner, Yuriy gave me a short tour of the home. His old room, which he’d lived in until he moved to Dallas, was slowly turning into the family’s storage unit. Yuriy took out a stack of notebooks from one of the desk drawers; inside were dozens of handwritten notes that Tiffany and Yuriy gave one another as teenagers. “She used to put her perfume on them too,” he said, as he gave the old books a quick sniff. He couldn’t smell anything. “I guess it’s been too long.”

*A notebook Tiffany and Yuriy passed back and forth in their teens. If you read what’s written, you can see much of Tiffany’s personality punching through*

I asked why he hadn’t thrown them away; Yuriy genuinely hated Tiffany after their breakup, after all. “For me, it was memories. I wasn’t obsessed or anything, but the person, when they made this for me, they weren’t angry. They kept me in mind, and that means something. It’d be messed up for me to throw it out because I was now angry.”

In the beginning of 2017, Yuriy had just ended his relationship of nearly nine years, and Tiffany was finishing her Bachelor’s degree in Texas. Living in Dallas had indeed brought some of the emotional and financial stability she’d hoped for; she’d recently received a prestigious scholarship from Sidley Austin LLP—the law firm where Barack and Michelle Obama first met each other—and, finally feeling like she was on the path she’d spent so long dreaming about, she decided to call Yuriy. "So much of my life began with him, and I didn’t want to have to keep living without some sort of resolution between us.”

Tiffany was worried Yuriy would still be angry at her, but time tends to heal wounds; Yuriy wanted to catch up. The two stayed on the phone, talking about everything that had happened in the past decade; school, relationships, family, and yes, Tiffany’s side of the breakup story. They talked all night, and then all day and night, and again, and after three days they both agreed they needed to meet in-person. Tiffany was taking a trip with her pre-law society to Washington D.C., and Yuriy agreed to drive down from NYC to meet up with her.

As their friends tell it, they’ve been inseparable ever since, but Yuriy’s parents were predictably furious when they found out. “They told me, ‘You’re going back in time, this girl is terrible for you, don’t you know?’ ” Yuriy said. Despite that, just a few months later, he decided to move out of his home to join Tiffany in Dallas, where she’d started paying a mortgage on a condo.

Yuriy recounted his emotions getting back together. “I moved against everyone’s wishes, and was going through a pretty deep depression.” Tiffany added, “When we first started dating again, we thought it’d be so much easier now as adults. But we soon realized how much our baggage affected the way that we communicated. As a kid, I never knew Yuriy was so emotional. He would be the one who would ground me, who would piece me back together again. I always admired that, and wanted to be that. But then I wasn’t tender to him in the way he needed me to be.”

Tiffany continued. “I wanted to approach our relationship from the emotional perspective of being business partners, that we’d always do the most rational thing. But as I realized that I’d hurt him if I continued to act the way I was—always forceful and direct—I slowly started to change, to actually change. Because when you see the person you love so much hurting so much, you can’t do anything else but change.”

Tiffany and Yuriy are each candid and precise storytellers. Ask a question of either of them, and in a classically New York, no bullshit way, they will speak their mind. Tiffany has to remind me often to get to the point of a sentence. “Vincent, I love your voice, and how you tell stories, but I’m really busy and I need you to speed it up,” she told me on a phone call two weeks before the wedding, in the midst of a hectic period of planning.

Yuriy, in particular, recounts history vividly, and is an excellent guide of both New York and his own mind.

One night, as we waited in the car for Tiffany to meet with her dressmaker for a final fitting, I asked about everything that had forced them to postpone their original wedding date of September 2019, and the aftermath of those events. I’d heard bits and pieces of the story; how Yuriy had been hospitalized; how Tiffany’s relationship with Yuriy’s parents crumbled yet again; how their wedding had been pushed to March 2020. I wondered especially about the second point. Parents disapproving of their children’s spousal choices is hardly uncommon, but that disapproval is rarely as one-dimensional as quick stories often portray.

In the dim, hushed confines of the car, Yuriy started from the beginning:

A few months before the original wedding date of September 2019, Yuriy’s parents, after being thoroughly against Yuriy’s relationship with Tiffany since it began nearly two decades earlier, finally decided to support the marriage. Yuriy and Tiffany were elated. They had to order kosher food, and add some cultural elements to the program, but those were small errands in the grand scheme of things; they’d both waited for this day for a long time.

Tiffany and Yuriy flew into New York in late July 2019, a little over a month before their wedding, to spend time with family and take care of wedding planning. The plan was to meet with vendors in-person and thus be more efficient than if they had to coordinate from Dallas. Tiffany flew out to Puerto Rico for her bachelorette party the day after they arrived in New York.

*Tiffany and her bridesmaids at her bachelorette party*

That same day, Yuriy began developing a fever. When his mother’s home remedies didn’t work, Yuriy visited the hospital, where he received a round of antibiotics. On Yuriy’s recommendation, Tiffany hadn’t flown back early from her trip. “It just seemed like a really bad fever the first few days,” he said, “and besides, she’d already spent the money on this trip.”

Three days later (Tiffany had returned at this point,) a week after Yuriy first started feeling sick, he began turning blue from a lack of oxygen. His mother, sister, and Tiffany rushed him to the hospital, where the nurse, at first, said they were all just overreacting. When the nurse eventually took his oxygen saturation levels, they were at 68%; the safe level is 98%.

He was finally put on oxygen. With Yuriy able to breathe again, doctors began trying to diagnose his problems. It made no sense that Yuriy, being so young, and healthy, was experiencing respiratory failure.

I felt my body tense up as Yuriy described his procedures. “I had a bronchoscopy, which is basically the worst fucking procedure in the world. They drown you; shove a tube up your nose, down your throat, pour water into your lungs, then quickly vacuum it out. They need to get pieces of the bacteria and your lung to test, but it’s cutting up all your shit, and…” Yuriy paused for a moment. “Probably too much detail.” He gave a soft laugh. “Here I am, trying to tell an unbiased story.”

Tiffany was with Yuriy through all of this during the day, but at night Yuriy told her to go back home to get some rest and take care of their belongings; the two hadn’t even unpacked since landing in New York. Tiffany begrudgingly agreed.

The next morning, Yuriy’s parents came to visit, along with many of Tiffany’s relatives. When they asked why Tiffany wasn’t there, and no one had an answer—Yuriy knew she was at home but hadn’t really been in touch with Tiffany, or anyone else for that matter, because of the pain and drugs—Yuriy’s parents were suspicious.

Tiffany came back that evening, but left not long after. Much of her day had been spent trying to get in touch with doctors and lawyers; she’d been hit by a car a year earlier during law school, and in addition to having to take medical leave because of the pain, she was fighting a court case to get a settlement from the driver who hit her. Yuriy knew it was painful for her to sleep without a bed, so he once again told her to go home that evening.

When Yuriy’s parents came back the next day and saw, for a second day, that Tiffany wasn’t there, whatever progress they’d made in their relationship quickly dissolved. They started asking questions. Why hadn’t Tiffany noticed that Yuriy was losing weight in Texas? Why hadn’t she flown back immediately when Yuriy started feeling sick? Why wasn’t she with Yuriy 24/7 in the hospital?

There were reasons for all of those things, logically valid reasons; Tiffany had indeed noticed Yuriy’s weight loss, but he’d been going through an unbelievably stressful time with moving to Dallas and his terrible relationship with his parents, and both he and Tiffany thought it was a result of that; Tiffany hadn’t flown back because she and Yuriy both agreed it made no sense to cancel the trip and waste the money when it seemed Yuriy only had a fever; and Tiffany hadn’t been in the hospital during the day because she’d been working through scheduling surgeries for her neck and back and meetings with lawyers, getting stuck running errands that should’ve been short but kept dragging longer the more she kept trying to rely on others who ended up leaving her to fend for herself.

But in Yuriy’s parents’ eyes, each logical reason just highlighted how Tiffany hadn’t taken the path a future wife should have taken. She should have drilled down into the real reason why Yuriy was losing weight and not chalked it up to stress; she should have flown right back home when Yuriy started getting sick, not caring about the money; she should have been smart enough to stop relying on others to help her with errands and just taken a cab to the hospital to be with her sick fiancé.

There’s sometimes a desire when telling a story to find a villain and a hero, to find ways of making one set of motivations more valid than another. But real life is never so simple. To remove nuance, self-doubt, decisions that aren’t in line with your character and which you regret forever is to remove any acknowledgement that to be human is often to do your best in an unpredictable and unfair world.

Tiffany returned to the hospital later that afternoon. Yuriy was more emotional than usual. “I’m fucking furious at you right now, Tiffany, for putting me through this,” he’d said. His parents were venting at him, and the last thing he wanted while drugged up and possibly near death was to also have to argue with his parents about Tiffany. “I said, ‘I need you to be smart enough to not lose yourself in all this bullshit. I can’t even rely on you right now, the one time I really need to rely on you.’ ”

Yuriy paused his storytelling. “That’s at least how I felt.”

Tiffany didn’t leave the hospital after that, but the emotional damage was done; Yuriy’s mom wouldn’t let Tiffany near him. She’d communicate to Tiffany, who was in the same room, by having Yuriy translate as she spoke Russian.

Yuriy was discharged about two weeks later. While the doctors never confirmed the exact cause, their best guess was that it was related to the string of mysterious vaping-related hospitalizations happening across the US. (Note, this was a few months before the first documented case of COVID-19 in the US.) “You’re coming straight home,” Yuriy’s mom told him. His parents were adamant that he call off the engagement and cancel the wedding. When he didn’t, every moment in Tiffany’s presence was a bitter one.

Yuriy and Tiffany left the house a few days later to stay with one of her cousins. In Yuriy’s words, “My parents disowned me, again.” (He’d already been disowned once for moving out to live with Tiffany in 2017.) They refused to have anything to do with the wedding, which was rescheduled to March 2020.

When we first talked in December 2019, a few months before the rescheduled wedding, Yuriy’s parents and Tiffany had not yet reconciled from the hospital incident. “I’ve made peace with the fact that they aren’t coming,” Yuriy had told me then.

By the wedding in March 2020, though, the situation had changed yet again. Yuriy’s father called shortly after Yuriy and Tiffany arrived in NYC in late February. “Your mother misses you; come visit home,” he told Yuriy. “But, without Tiffany.”

Yuriy was exasperated. “It started everything again. I was like, ‘Are we seriously going through this same conversation? This is the woman I’ll marry, with whom I’m going to have kids. You’re not going to have me without her, and I’m not going to have my kids grow up in an environment where people are talking shit about each other.’” He’d grown up in a similar environment; Yuriy’s father relationship with his in-laws hadn’t been good, either.

They had dinner at home (the same home where I’d join for Shabbat dinner a week later) to hash things out. Tiffany was insanely anxious the whole time. Already on thin ice, she was worried she’d say or do something wrong. Yuriy’s parents talked to her only through Yuriy’s translations of their Russian, and then got upset when she assumed she should do the same thing of talking to them via Yuriy.

The dinner ended with Yuriy’s parents deciding they’d attend the wedding, though it was obvious it was more to support Yuriy than to support his marriage to Tiffany.

We can’t choose our parents, and perhaps that’s why getting along with them can be so laborious. In childhood, we see them not as human beings, but as an assumption about our world. And so when something about that assumption changes, as it does when we experience any kind of trauma or growth in life, it takes us time to rationalize the new reality.

“My parents have always been great, except for right now, while Tiffany’s were the opposite,” Yuriy told me. Growing up, his parents did everything in their power to provide their kids with a loving home and everything they needed. Tiffany’s parents, on the other hand, expected her to act and learn as an adult before she was ready to, and without much guidance or support from them.

Tiffany’s own relationship with her parents has healed, a bit, over the years. She’s hesitant to speak too publicly about some of the details of the abuse she went through growing up, but when I asked about what it’d taken to get to where she was now with her parents—neither particular close, nor particularly distant—she said, “Everything. Acceptance, forgiveness, anger, love; I need all of it in order to deal with them.”

She still quarrels frequently with both her mom and dad, but she also has tender moments with them now; watching her mother dance during her bridal shower; quick kisses on the cheek or hugs after visiting each of them at their homes; quiet but loving looks from her father during the wedding.

*Tiffany dancing with her mother at her bridal shower*

*Pictures of Tiffany and her younger brother in their father’s home*

After going through so much to be together, Tiffany and Yuriy hoped their wedding would be a chance to focus on each other, and let everything else fade away.

“We want it to be a breakout from our past lives, for us to start making our own path. Everyone who’s there, we’ll appreciate it, and love it, but it’s gonna be like tunnel vision, where we just see each other, and everything else will disappear into a backdrop,” Yuriy described to me back in December 2019.

Their wedding was hosted at the top of a Queens icon, Terrace on the Park, a T-shaped building that overlooks Flushing Meadow Park. From its rooftop, you can see the powerful sawtooth silhouette of Manhattan. Subway trains, which normally feel so fast as a passenger, look like playthings from this view, and walking in the park below are countless families, lovers, dogs, and teenagers, all building their own memories of this space and city.

*A photo I took at the top of Terrace on the Park on Tiffany and Yuriy’s wedding night. The two humps of Manhattan’s Midtown and Downtown are visible in the distance*

Not my video, but really shows how beautiful the scenery was. The action movie music is a nice touch

Tiffany and Yuriy’s wedding was complete with all the expected flair; grand entrances, rehearsed toasts, elements from both of their Filipino-Dominican and Bukharian-Jewish cultures.

Their ceremony was a traditionally Jewish one. Neither Yuriy or Tiffany are religious, but Judaism, perhaps more than any other religion, is as engrained as a culture as it is a religion. Yuriy still hoped to honor that culture. It was complete with a beautiful chuppah (pronounced hoo-pah), which Tiffany and Yuriy stood under with their families.

*Tiffany and Yuriy walking towards their chuppah, or canopy, which symbolizes a Jewish home. It’s open on all four sides, which represents hospitality to ones’ guests.*

The rabbi, whose home we’d visited a few days prior to pick out a ketubah (the Jewish marriage contract), was the only one Yuriy had been able to find who was willing to perform the ceremony. “All the other Bukharian Rabbis asked about Tiffany, and after finding out her background, backed out,” he told me. It was evidently somehow a risk to marry the two of them.

*Yuriy and Tiffany looking at the different ketubah’s they could choose; many were beautiful hand-printed works of art, in addition to being an actual contract.*

The reception afterwards, with food, decorations, dances, and lots of music, was a fusion of their cultures as well. Tiffany’s Filipino family and friends took over the dance floor with line dances whenever their songs came up; Pitbull’s Fireball, Blake Shelton’s Footloose, and the ever popular Todo Todo by Daniela Romo. Yuriy’s family filled the dance floor when the sound of ceaseless tambourines and twangy strings, hallmarks of Bukharian music, played. “Just twisting in lightbulbs,” is how Yuriy described the dancing to me.

Video of the dancing with Bukharian and Filipino music

The day was far from logistically perfect; Tiffany and her bridesmaids’ hair and makeup took much longer than expected, which forced a sense of scramble upon the rest of the day; during the ceremony, the Rabbi stumbled over a few important parts, and when someone in Yuriy’s family started shouting to point out that fact, he became flustered and skipped over even more; and late in the day, Yuriy realized someone had forgotten the table placements, which he and Tiffany had spent hours making the previous nights, at the hotel, resulting in me making a last-minute dash to grab them before the reception. (I’d volunteered since the other photographers and videographers could replace some of my work, while no one could replace Yuriy and Tiffany’s friends and family.)

*A short but tense moment after the ceremony; Yuriy’s dad is on the right commenting on the mistakes the Rabbi had unfortunately made*

It was a more stressful experience than I imagine either Tiffany or Yuriy would’ve preferred. “I’ve never heard of a groom having to deal with this much random shit throughout the day,” Yuriy told me a few weeks after the wedding. I wasn’t surprised; weddings already tend to be stressful for the couple because of how much pressure there is to keep up appearances and to keep everything on-time. Add on having to find the solution for every hiccup that interrupted the day—playing peacemaker to drama between family members, or both being absurdly woken up the night before by a groomsman and bridesmaid who said “please, stop snoring so loudly”—and any bride and groom would’ve been antagonized.

*Yuriy watching a video on how to tie his tie a very particular way after a somewhat unrestful night of sleep*

“But, no matter how crazy and stressful it was, we found relief in each other,” Tiffany told me. “There were plenty of good stories afterwards, too.” She grinned. “My parents are divorced, but my mom still likes to jokingly hit on my dad, and he still blushes whenever that happens.” Tiffany started laughing, recalling a moment between the two of them at the wedding. “As we were taking family photos, my mom said to him, ‘Oh no… don’t get too close to me, or else I might get pregnant again… although… the factory may be closed, but the gates are still open!’ My dad’s ears glowed beet red afterwards.”

*Screenshot from someone’s phone video of Tiffany with her mom and dad*

“It wouldn’t have really been our wedding if shit hadn’t gone down. The people there, the personalities present; someone was going to act out.” Tiffany looked over to Yuriy. “Right babe?”

“Yuppp,” he replied with a droll nod.

Having gone through so much together, delighted in one another, bruised and broken each other’s hearts beyond any plausible repair, the fact that their wedding happened at all was far more important to Tiffany and Yuriy than the fact that everything went “perfectly.”

I thought back on their first dance, a choreographed flit set to Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect.” They’d been practicing in the evenings for a few days now, mastering the steps their Dallas instructor drilled into their bodies.

Tiffany and Yuriy practicing their first dance

Ed Sheeran’s songs play at almost every wedding. His lyrics evoke a strong but usually vague sense of love and longing and nostalgia, perfect for weddings.

Perhaps it was just because I knew Tiffany and Yuriy’s story so well; perhaps Ed Sheeran is simply a genius at writing and singing in a way that leaves space for you to embed your own experiences within his harmonies.

But even so, that night, in this simple yet precise song about childhood love, his lyrics shed their opaque inflection for Tiffany and Yuriy

For maximum feels, press Play above, and watch the slideshow of photos below. Unfortunately playing and reading at the same time only works on desktop

I found a love for me
Darling, just dive right in
And follow my lead
Well, I found a girl, beautiful and sweet
I never knew you were the someone waiting for me
'Cause we were just kids when we fell in love
Not knowing what it was
I will not give you up this time
Darling, just kiss me slow, your heart is all I own
And in your eyes, you're holding mine
Baby, I'm dancing in the dark with you between my arms
Barefoot on the grass, we're listenin' to our favorite song
When you said you looked a mess, I whispered underneath my breath
But you heard it, darling, you look perfect tonight