One thing Jason Robert Santiago loves about his job as a New York City bus driver is that he can accomplish a lot of ideas behind the wheel.
Last fall he understood how he would propose to Tiffany Antoinette Lawler. A few years ago, he overcame a fleeting concern that she might be obsessed with him. Recently, he has been pondering tips from regular passengers on how to make a marriage last.
“One of them told me that if you want to survive it, you have to learn to let go of the little things or that you'll be resenting that person,” he said. He and Lawler already have experience working on big things. Since 2023 they have been trying to get their child pregnant.
Lawler and Santiago, 36, are native New Yorkers. In early January 2020, he saw her photos on Instagram and agreed to the app. She was the person he wanted to connect with. “I saw that she was a good looking girl and thought I would take a shot,” he said. He sent her a message to introduce herself. For a week they gave a message. When he began lobbying for a date, he made sure she knew that he would need at least one day's notice to get ready.
“I remember him saying, 'You have to have a haircut on a Friday night so please tell me if you're free,'” Lawler said. Her job as general manager at Paul Labrecque Salon & Skincare Spa on East 57th Avenue in Manhattan made her self-aware of his appearance.
Lawler, the daughter of a retired NYPD police officer, grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, along with her younger brother Jason Lawler. Their parents, Louise Bruno and Thomas Roller, moved in with their maternal grandmother, Antoinette Bruno, when she was a baby. In 2002, Lawler's mother died suddenly on Christmas Day from an infection that caused her to the throat of streptococcus. Lawler was 14 years old. Jason, a New York City police officer, was seven years old, just like his father. The sadness we shared brought our families closer. “There was always a lot of laughs at home,” she said. “Jason and I were both good kids and we all respected each other.”
In 2014, grief over the loss of his family came again for her when Ms. Laurel's grandmother, who had become like a mother, passed away after a stroke. “It was even more traumatic than when my mother passed away,” she said. “It was the most difficult time of my life.”
A year later she was hired as a receptionist at Paul Labrecque.
By then, she had earned an associate degree in psychology from a university on Staten Island, looking for changes in the landscape.
“I've always worked locally,” she said, often at the front desk of the spa and salon. “I had to leave Brooklyn.”
He commutes to Manhattan and goes to Paul Love Reck and has a sense of refinement in it: “It felt like an adult job,” she said. In 2017, Lawler left Bensonhurst's home and purchased an apartment on Staten Island.
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Santiago was born in Bensonhurst and grew up in the Great Kills on Staten Island. He and his two sisters, one older and one younger sister, raised in part by grandparents after their mother and father Alison Heilweil Santiago and Rogerio Santiago.
When he graduated from Susan E. Wagner High School, he took several online college courses, but nothing forced him to a degree. For years he bounced from work to work. “You gave it a name and I tried it. I cleaned the carpet, repaired the floods, delivered pizza.” He believes his mother is helping to land what is called “Solid City Jobs” at the Metropolitan Transportation Agency in 2015. She signed him up for the test to qualify him as a bus driver.
On January 9, 2020, Lawler told Santiago to book a haircut. He drove the Rush Hour Express bus from Staten Island to Manhattan and returned on weekdays so she felt it was safe for him to pick her up at her condo in his jeep. Her confidence that he is not the reckless type was not two-way at first.
“She got into the car with a drink in her hand,” Santiago said. “Maybe she thought she was a bit wild for me,” she told him later that night, that drink was a way to keep her nerves at bay. Once they started talking, she knew she didn't need it.
Santiago later lived with his grandmother, Irene Gafun Makarsa, on Staten Island. “Some women may be turned off by men living with men in their 30s,” Lawler said. “But he was caring for her after he collapsed. I respected him. I was caring for her grandma before she passed away. It felt like a good connection.”
As Roller's job was in a salon with a high-class reputation, Santiago didn't expect him to be someone who felt he could have joked about it. “You'd think she's snobby or high maintenance,” he said. “She wasn't at all.” That night they kissed in the red light of the drive house. His haircut was approved by her in a style called “tape-up” called Mr. Roller (short sides and longer tops).
Before Covid began in March, they had spent so much time including Mr. Santiago's bus. Mr. Lawler began to get in her way to catch 55th Avenue after work – Santiago worried that things were too fast. “He sat me down and said, 'I really like you, but I think we should pump the brakes,'” Lawler said. “For a week or so, I had this weirdness. I didn't know how to act.”
“I didn't want to get tired of her,” he said. “I thought maybe it was a bit. Maybe she's hooked on me.” When he signed Covid after that spring, his ambiguity changed when he moved to her condo to isolate away from his grandmother. “Tiffany took care of me,” he said, and they got along well. “It was about pumping the brakes.”
Santiago moved to Roller's Condo Permanent last summer. By then he wanted him to marry her. However, he knew that marriage was not her number one priority.
“Tiffany wants to be a mother rather than a wife,” he said. As soon as they became a couple they agreed that they wanted a baby. “From the start, Jason and I were very open to the idea of what was going to happen,” she said. By early 2023, after a series of fertility tests, they had begun to accept that, for them, it could be necessary to think, medical intervention.
“I was never married,” she said. “I always thought Jason and I probably had kids, and then we'd go to city hall with our wedding band and legalize everything,” Santiago surprised the plan on October 26th. He was planning the moment on the bus route.
During his vacation in the Bahamas, he wrote, “Would you marry me?” In the sand. “I didn't think Jason was that considerate,” Lawler said. She also did not expect to engage in lifting the mist of disappointment over their troubled pregnancy. But at least in part. “I started thinking. Maybe God has another plan for us. We are supposed to get married first. It was a very happy time for me.”
On March 20th, Lawler and Santiago married Nishinojima, the host of the Staten Island Marriage Bureau, which was probably Bruno's 100th birthday. Fifteen guests were present, including Laurel's brother and father, and Santiago's mother and grandmother.
Ms. Roller wore a short white dress with black stockings and an elbow-length custom veil inspired by an old photo of her favorite celebrity, Priscilla Presley. Santiago wore a grey suit that he had shopped at JCPenney with his mother.
“It felt intimate but fun,” Lawler said shortly after the wedding. Santiago was happy to call her his wife. “I'm just looking at the smile like she did — she's the best,” he said.
Both left the Marriage Bureau, who they hoped for in the future. “We're excited to move on to the next stage together,” Lawler said. “I think being parents is around the corner.”
This day
March 20, 2025
Staten Island Marriage Bureau
After the ceremony, cheers and chopsticks, the couple and their guests went out for Chinese cuisine at their favourite Staten Island restaurant, Oriental Plaza. “I wanted Maine, dumplings, diet cola,” Lawler said. “Like New York.” On May 9th, they will hold a big reception for 50 guests at the Italian restaurant Staten Island location in Patrizia.
Couples who want to have the same insurance as the couple who married will benefit from couples who want to help their infertility journey. Santiago's state health benefits could cover a large portion of the costs of intrauterine insemination or in vitro fertilization costs, Lawler said.
Passenger Jewelry One of Mr. Santiago's regular passengers is a jeweler. A few days before the wedding, he said, “He met me at his stop at his ringsizer so he could figure out what size my wedding ring would be.” “It was pretty special.”
