When Nancy Balbirer and Howard Morris met as drama students at New York University in 1983, they developed a crush on each other that almost led to romance.

“I loved him immediately, and I practically threw myself at him,” said Ms. Balbirer, then an 18-year-old freshman. “He was cute, funny and very smart, and he had the most exciting and fabulous energy of anyone I had ever known.”

Mr. Morris, then a 19-year-old sophomore, was equally smitten. “She was extremely attractive, sexy and very outgoing,” he said. “We really hit it off.”

Despite their instant chemistry, the aspiring actors — she from Weston, Conn., and he from Newton, Mass. — shared nary a kiss. “The problem was me,” said Mr. Morris, who is now 51 and based in Los Angeles, where he is the executive producer and co-creator of the Netflix comedy series “Grace and Frankie.”

“I absolutely wanted to date her,” he said, “but she was more mature than I was and sort of intimidated me. I guess I wasn’t ready for her emotionally.”

They settled on being friends, which frustrated Ms. Balbirer, who is now 50 and a New York-based writer and actress. “Howie always had a girlfriend,” she said, but “that girlfriend was never me.”

They spent the next few years honing their respective crafts — Mr. Morris eventually delved into playwriting — and bouncing around campus in Lower Manhattan, often enjoying lunch together. “Nancy was always nice enough to pay,” Mr. Morris said, adding “because I was always broke.”

As the end of college approached, his crush persisted, but so did his inability to step up and express his feelings. Rather than cause a scene, he chose to create one. He wrote a school play — “about a guy with a broken heart,” he said — called “Almost Romance,” a comedy in which he cast himself in the lead and Ms. Balbirer as his love interest. (The four-person play also featured a fellow drama student named Jeremy Piven, of future “Entourage” fame.)

“How would you feel about making out with Howard Morris, the lead actor in my play?” Mr. Morris asked Ms. Balbirer. If only for a scripted New York minute, she was thrilled to become his leading lady. “It was a lot of fun,” she said. “My goodness, I didn’t have to do any acting when it came to making out with Howie.”

In addition to what he called “the perfect kiss,” Mr. Morris was soon reaping other benefits from his production. A director who had seen and enjoyed the play took it to the Manhattan Punchline Theater, which had a reputation for producing comedy writers.

“Almost Romance,” with Fisher Stevens and Helen Slater in the lead roles, ran for nearly seven weeks to favorable reviews, and by the time the final curtain closed, Mr. Morris had an agent and some name recognition in the industry.

In 1991, he moved to Los Angeles to join the staff of the HBO sitcom “Dream On.” He was soon noticed by Marta Kauffman, a television writer and producer who had created that show and was also a creator of “Friends.” (Ms. Kauffman and Mr. Morris eventually created “Grace and Frankie,” which debuted last year.)

With his writing career on the rise, Mr. Morris married in May 1994, which became a bittersweet time for an old castmate, who was still single.

“At that point, I had kind of resigned myself to the fact that even though I felt we were perfect for each other, Howie would never feel that way,” Ms. Balbirer said, adding, “I just figured it was time to move on.” Four months later, she did just that, moving — of all places — to Los Angeles to pursue acting. She eventually landed parts including three episodes of “Seinfeld,” and resumed her old role as frequent lunch partner of Mr. Morris.

“We clearly still had strong feelings for each other, but it was completely platonic,” she said.

They remained close friends, and in 1999, the same year Ms. Balbirer wrote “Take Your Shirt Off and Cry” — a book, she said, “about the perils of being a woman in show business” — she invited Mr. Morris to her own wedding in Los Angeles, which he attended.

“Though I was happily married, I must admit to feeling a tinge of sadness that day,” he said.

By 2002, Mr. Morris, who had a 2-year-old son, was in the throes of a divorce. That same year, Ms. Balbirer, whose career focus had shifted to writing, moved back to New York with her husband. “Just when I needed my best friend the most, she was leaving,” Mr. Morris said. She became what he called “my email shoulder to lean on.”

In March 2011, it was Mr. Morris’s turn to lend a shoulder as Ms. Balbirer separated from her husband, with whom she had a 6-year-old daughter. “We were calling it a temporary separation at that time,” she said. But by July, her separation became permanent. To make matters worse, her beloved dog, Ira, died shortly afterward.

“I was feeling numb and going through therapy, just trying to figure out what was going on in my life,” she said. “It was like I was trapped in a bad dream.”

Two months later, Mr. Morris went to New York to attend the wedding of a friend and visited Ms. Balbirer to both console her and profess his love for her, hoping that the stage had now been set for their long-awaited romance.

But Ms. Balbirer flipped the script. “I told Howie that I wasn’t ready for him emotionally,” she said. “I needed time to heal and didn’t want to simply fold myself into his life, nor did I want him to be, after all the years we shared as friends and everything he had meant to me, nothing more than a rebound.

“I couldn’t believe that after all those years, I was finally hearing Howard Morris telling me that he loved me. And there I was, unable to do anything about it.”

Rather than force the issue, Mr. Morris thought it best to back off a little, and simply told Ms. Balbirer to “trust your instincts.”

He returned to Los Angeles, where he continued to monitor Ms. Balbirer’s emotional health, as well as her dating status. “He would always check in to see if I was single or dating someone,” Ms. Balbirer said with a chuckle.

In the summer of 2014, Ms. Balbirer, who was now single and in a much better place emotionally, sent Mr. Morris a long, humorous email in which she wondered, among other things, how it was that they never became an item.

Mr. Morris, who was still pining over her, read the email aloud to his writers, who were spellbound. One of them, Alexa Junge, said she turned to Mr. Morris and said, “If you don’t marry this woman, I will.”

When Mr. Morris confessed to his staff that he was still very much in love with Ms. Balbirer, Ms. Junge began devising a plan to get them together. Knowing that she would be in New York on business in April 2015, Ms. Junge reached out to Ms. Balbirer.

“She was everything I hoped she would be, beautiful and smart,” Ms. Junge said of Ms. Balbirer, whose divorce had been completed four months earlier.

Late in the conversation, Ms. Balbirer blurted out: “Can I just tell you? I’ve been in love with Howard Morris for 30 years.”

“It was an incredible moment,” Ms. Junge said. “I remember catching my breath and saying, ‘Well, I think it might be mutual.’”

Ms. Junge, who had written a play that was to open in June at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, convinced Ms. Balbirer to join her there, along with Mr. Morris and other members of his staff. Ms. Balbirer went along, and said that she and Mr. Morris had a great time. They flew back to California on a Sunday for their first-ever date, at a restaurant near his home in Santa Monica.

During dinner, Ms. Balbirer experienced an awakening of sorts. “I looked across the table and said to Howie, ‘Oh my God, it’s been you all along.’”

“I had always loved him,” she said. “But now I was realizing that I could finally have him.”

Later that evening, Ms. Balbirer was preparing to head back to New York on a red-eye flight, but before leaving for the airport, she returned to Mr. Morris’s home, where they started on a romance that almost began 32 years earlier.

“We shared our first real kiss that night,” Ms. Balbirer said. “I never felt happier or more alive than I did at that moment.”

They were married on March 25 at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau, in the company of Ms. Balbirer’s 11-year-old daughter, Colette Zighelboim, who served as her maid of honor, and Mr. Morris’s 16-year-old son, Dustin Morris, his best man. Their witness was Ms. Junge.

Shortly after Alisa Fuentes, a staff member in the City Clerk’s office, said, “By the power vested in me by the laws of the State of New York, I now pronounce you married,” Ms. Balbirer turned to Mr. Morris and said softly, “You were worth the wait.”

Later that evening, the couple celebrated with a dozen other family members and friends at one of their old haunts, the Odeon. “We love this place because it’s been around since the 1980s, like us,” Ms. Balbirer said. (“But now I pay,” Mr. Morris joked.)

Ms. Balbirer — who will move to California this summer so that her daughter can begin middle school there — noted that her wedding dinner also served as an anniversary celebration.

“It was 30 years ago that Howie wrote ‘Almost Romance,’” she said. To help celebrate it, Mr. Morris received a wedding ring from Ms. Balbirer with an inscription created by her daughter that read: “N + H Almost Romance, March 25 2016,” but the word ‘Almost’ had been crossed out by a thin line running through it.

“The ‘Almost’ is gone,” Ms. Balbirer said. “The ‘Romance’ is here to stay.”