A few Aprils ago, I arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport to see a man I had met just twice before. I had a hastily packed bag full of clothes and no real clue of where I’d be going or how long I’d be staying. I had a return flight to London booked for three months later, because the customs officer might ask for proof that I wasn’t going to stay forever, but I still had a small but persistent idea that I’d never go home. I knew either this man would break my heart or I’d marry him, a terrifying feeling that, if you ever have it, you should savor. When he picked me up, after I’d waited for two hours in the passport queue, he gave me three gifts: a novelty cowboy hat, a copy of the Constitution, and a bottle of Fireball Whisky. “Welcome home,” he said.
They say that the most stressful things you can do in life are to get married, have kids, move, or grieve the death of a loved one. He and I have done all of that now, and we did it all within about one year of meeting. But back at that airport, we didn’t know any of that was coming. We were too busy looking at Google Maps and planning a road trip. He wanted to show me America, he said. I wanted to see it. But we also wanted to show each other ourselves. We knew just enough about one another to know that we needed to know everything else.
I may be making this sound at least slightly more dramatic than it really was. By the time I had reached the U.S., we at least knew we could tolerate one another for several days at a stretch. We first met in late 2023, in Washington, D.C. I was on a work trip, visiting the American office of the British magazine I wrote for. He was there because he was also a journalist. It was an uneventful lunch at an oyster bar, organized by my editor—the sort of polite industry gathering where everyone has exactly two drinks and exchanges pleasantries and nothing of consequence is supposed to happen. But there I encountered a melancholy man who was too revealing about himself. He told the table about how he was three days sober after being drunk for six months straight, and still pining—his word—for his ex-girlfriends. Something about him stuck with me.
