Samantha Brooke Berkule and Scott Stuart Johnson were married Saturday evening in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla. Cantor Jill E. Abramson officiated at the Acqualina Resort and Spa on the Beach.
The bride, 35, is an assistant professor of psychology at Marymount Manhattan College and a research assistant professor of pediatrics at New York University. She graduated from Cornell and received a master’s in psychology and a doctorate in developmental psychology from Yeshiva University. Her previous marriage ended in divorce. She is the daughter of Andrea S. Berkule of Yonkers and the late Lloyd I. Berkule.
The groom, 41, owns SJ Partners, a New York investment firm, and is an adjunct professor teaching entrepreneurial finance at Columbia Business School. He graduated from Columbia, from which he also received a Master of International Affairs and an M.B.A. He is the son of Cindy S. Johnson and Tod S. Johnson of Scarsdale, N.Y.
Dr. Berkule and Mr. Johnson became acquainted in 2012 after she reached out to him through Match.com.
“I usually never contacted anyone first,” she said, but she had decided to take online dating seriously and followed the website’s advice to get in touch with a certain number of people.
In doing so, she recalled: “I looked at his profile and saw one of his dogs. I liked everything about him.”
“He’s way too athletic for me,” she remembered thinking after reading that he was both an amateur pilot and a competitive dog musher. “He’s really cute. I’ll never hear from him.”
A day after her initial contact, he called her. She described their conversation as lacking and “slow to warm up.” (She later learned that he was driving home from New Hampshire, where he was training with his two dogs for a race.)
She did learn that they had grown up in neighboring towns in Westchester County — he in Scarsdale and she in New Rochelle — which further motivated her to join him for drinks in Midtown a couple of days later.
Their date flew by as they spoke about politics, his interest in aviation, and trips she took to the racetrack with her father, an amateur drag racer, when she was younger. (At the track, he would teach her how to work on muscle cars and change tires.)
She used her mechanical know-how to test Mr. Thompson, who she found approached airplanes with both understanding and humility.
“She seemed great,” he said. “She had a passion for car racing. Aviation intrigued her. Things were clicking.”
They went out to dinner two more times that week, and by Sunday, their fourth date, they were flying — literally, in a Cirrus SR22, a propeller plane.
“She was very special, and I wanted to bring her flying,” he said.
He took her on a 20-minute ride from White Plains to the Orange County Airport in Montgomery, N.Y.
“I was a little bit nervous,” she said, adding that once they were in flight, “I never felt more carefree in my life.”
They had lunch at Rick’s Runway Cafe, the airport’s restaurant, and later had dinner in Manhattan at an Ethiopian place. She recalled him saying he wanted to wait to introduce her to his dogs, Leyla, a Eurohound, which is typically bred for sled-dog racing, and Sheba, an Alaskan husky, to make sure “she liked him for him, and not for the dogs.”
The next day, he left on a weeklong dog-sledding trip in New England. She was not so sure she would hear from him again, based on her dating experience.
That uncertainty lifted when she received a book from him a couple of days later, “Flight Training: Taking the Short Approach,” with a note saying: “I had a wonderful weekend together and look forward to seeing you again soon. Hope you enjoy this book! (And, don’t have too many questions ... we can’t just talk about flying).”
A few weeks later, he introduced her to Leyla and Sheba.
ROSALIE R. RADOMSKY
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