“This is truly a story of a love connection,” Griffith tells PEOPLE exclusively after proposing last month in Scotland to her partner of five years.
SoulCycle master instructor Melanie Griffith is engaged!
The New York City based spin teacher proposed to her fiancée, Jessica Marino, last month while on vacation in Scotland, PEOPLE can confirm. The two initially met in 2011 when Marino was training for an Ironman triathlon and needed to log miles on a bike.
“First she was a rider in the class,” Griffith tells PEOPLE exclusively. “And then we had a really strong group of friends, and probably a solid six or seven year period of time where Jessica was my best friend, and each of us were going on about our lives.”
At the time, Griffith was in the midst of a difficult split from her ex-husband, while Marino was single. Neither had ever dated a woman.
“It’s an interesting story because there’s no big coming out story for either one of us,” Griffith shares. “This is truly a story of a love connection that just went beyond gender [or] sexuality. Although we now, five years into our relationship, are very comfortable with the terminology queer.”
Griffith recalls how their relationship turned romantic after a night out in 2018.
“The real story is there was a late night of dancing with a whole group of friends, and we ended up kissing,” Griffith says. “We were like, ‘Wait an actual minute. Maybe this is something that we should go for, for real.’ It really kind of blew us both away. This moment where we knew we loved each other, we knew we were deeply connected to each other.”
After taking some time to have conversations with Griffith’s three children and her ex-husband, the two decided to give their love a chance.
“Recently we’ve been really thinking about the way our relationship is,” explains Griffith, who’s a two-time cancer survivor. “It’s a life commitment, and so it’s a natural thing to want to be married. At the same time we’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t need to be married,’ and then a few things happened where the legality of it just felt like the right thing.”
Griffith decided she wanted to pop the question to Jessica in Scotland where her mom grew up. “At the beginning of the year, we had kind of made this decision like, ‘Let’s just get married. We can do it our way. Let’s go look at rings.’ We decided to have lab diamonds, because why not? It’s the right thing to do for the environment. It’s the right thing to do in every way, and it was much more affordable.”
Griffith surprised Marino with a ring after she returned home from a run during their trip abroad.
“We were sitting there taking pictures on the stoop of my house where my mom grew up,” Griffith shares. “There just happened to be a newly erected wooden bench on the grass opposite where the stoop was, and so I said to Jessica, ‘Hey, do you want to come over here and talk to me for a second?'”
She continues: “In her mind, Jessica thought I was wanting to connect to her, maybe have a little space from my brother and just be private, connect about my mom, who’s been dead for 11 years. I was feeling kind of emotional and connected to her in her home country.”
As the couple sat and talked, Marino didn’t realize the proposal was happening.
“I started saying nice things to her and we were locked in and talking, and she was crying and really had absolutely no idea that I was proposing,” Griffith says. “I kind of shifted my body and made it as though I was down on one knee. I didn’t quite put my knee down and pulled out the ring from my pocket, that my daughter had given to me that day, and then she kind of realized. She could barely process.”
After celebrating with family all over Europe, the couple is back home in New York City and eyeing a spring 2024 wedding.
“We picked a place,” Griffith says. “We locked it in. It’s a raw space in Brooklyn. They’ve done a bunch of weddings. There’s a rooftop, and our plan is to mostly just have a party and a celebration. At first we thought, ‘Oh, we’ll keep the wedding ceremony very small.’ Then we thought, ‘You know, maybe we’ll just keep it casual, but we’ll let everybody come,’ and so we’re letting all the ideas float around, and we’re trying to not be too focused on the details.”
