I spent the first pandemic fall living alone in a mobile home park by the beach in Malibu, where leathery older men watered their small patches of lawn and I learned to drive a golf cart—the local form of transport—to and from the supermarket. It often broke down and had to be pushed, but I have never driven a car, and so it still felt like freedom. I had a funny feeling of peace as I looked out on the Pacific Coast Highway, as if these were my last days of silence and I should burrow in as deep as I could. I napped a lot to the sound of speeding cars and held my dog to my chest, engaging in an ornate fantasy that we were the last women left after a terrible ancient war and we were on a Viking ship being sent, over many days, across the sea to safety.
I wept as I left for London in early January to make a movie, saying goodbye to the trailer and to yet another unsatisfying affair. But this romance, if you could call it that, had felt different somehow. I had been completely honest about who I was and where I was headed—toward adoption after a hysterectomy at 31—and totally open to the idea that the other person might not be headed there too. After the guy stopped speaking to me, I spent my 14-day quarantine in London staring up at the ceiling, listening to Fiona Apple, a great and final emo emptying out.
So when my future husband rang my doorbell a month later (we had been set up to meet casually by friends who I guarantee did not see what was coming), I answered with a belief that I would be fine no matter the result but also, for reasons I didn’t yet understand, a pounding heart. I had only seen a few Instagram photos of Luis, and my first impression was that he looked like a vampire Lord Byron. About 20 minutes into our date he told me he didn’t drink, and I asked why. “Do you really want to get this intense?” he asked. “Always,” I responded.
He began to tell me a story of trauma, of generational pain and rebuilding of the self, but he did it with laughter in his eyes, like he wasn’t mocking me but the absurdity of what the universe can dole out to two people in their brief 35 years on earth. And that was the moment I understood that I was likely sitting across from my soul mate, if that’s a term we want to use.
From that night on, we were never really apart. Three weeks later, I told him with a dry mouth and clammy hands that I wanted to become a mother and was already trying. “Not, you know, with my vagina,” I stuttered. “But with my heart.” I had made the choice to date in parallel to the adoption process with the knowledge that whomever I was seeing would likely not be able to walk me all the way through it. After all, the last two guys I’d been involved with had said “but we’re so young” when I mentioned kids. Thirty-five, I regretted to inform them, was no longer prom-mom status. I didn’t feel much when these guys made it clear that fatherhood was not on their radar, but as
I told Luis my plans, my throat felt like it was closing up. I knew that if this guy pushed me away, it would feel different—like real loss.
But instead of cowering, he told me that he wanted me to have everything I dreamed of, that I would make a beautiful mother, and—when I worried that he would suddenly find me unpalatable, less footloose and fancy-free—he assured me that “mum energy is hot.”
“Wow,” I said. “Three weeks in I bring up kids. I am not chill to date.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But what’s interesting about chill?”
Within a month we were living together in my one-bedroom rental in central London. We ate udon at the counter at night and he played guitar in bed in a flannel nightgown of mine he had co-opted and wears to this day, calling it “my pajama” (singular). He told me, not in words but with actions, exactly who he was as he nursed me through physical health challenges and cheered on professional duties that seemed insurmountable. I fell in love with his art—he’s a musician and composer and we’ve collaborated more in the last nine months than I have with most colleagues over 10 years—and with his cooking—spaghetti made with ginger and kale, a perfectly seared tuna steak laid over it—and he fell in love with my hairless dog. I decided to stay in England for the summer, and we rented a sunny house with a garden. He had never lived in a house of his own before, and as he gingerly placed a few tchotchkes on the mantle, I battled a sense that stories like this didn’t belong to women like me.
What kind of women? Flawed women. Tortured, anxious women. Fat women. I knew, intellectually, that this sort of thinking was archaic and imposed on me by a system I didn’t believe in. But at the time, it was impossible not to see a running tally of Instagram vixens who seemed more deserving of his careful attention and really good hair. And so, when I became sick in June with a bladder infection that wouldn’t quit, it seemed to me like the death knell of this magical period. He would realize, finally and forever, that someone like him—wise (he doesn’t speak ill of others without noting that they are suffering their own story) and kind (he is the only person I know who always goes to an ATM and returns to give cash to someone who needs it) and talented (he hears songs in his sleep and wakes up in a rush to record the melody)—could not make a life with someone like me.
It felt like the part of myself I had been desperate to hide—weakened and sweaty, bedbound—was coming out like Michael Myers returning to haunt Jamie Lee Curtis. He didn’t seem shaken. As I sat in place at his birthday party, too pained to move, his red-haired five-year-old goddaughter asked in an almost challenging singsong whether we were married. “Is Lena my godmumma now?”
“Basically,” he told her happily. “We’re married in our minds.” I felt like I had been chosen to be Miss Universe without even competing.
When the infection didn’t abate after another month, I was checked into the hospital for three nights. He visited faithfully, wearing sunglasses at night to make me laugh and chatting up the nurses like he was Sinatra working Vegas. He was somehow making this place of disappointment and pain feel almost…fun. To him, it wasn’t much, but to me it was everything.
I came home on a Friday night. England had just qualified for the Euro final, and crowds were singing a song from the ’90s: “It’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming, football’s coming home.” He made a video of him cradling my dog—now, clearly, ours—singing “she’s coming home, she’s coming home, she’s coming, mumma’s coming home!” In bed that night, we proposed to each other, and the next day we began to plan our wedding. I was prepared for the idea that people back home might call me crazy, and I didn’t mind. We both felt we had lived enough to know that happiness, when you find it, must not just be grabbed but throttled. And we were—we are—very happy.
Writers talk a lot about how hard it is to write once they become happy, like it’s some dulled state. But that wasn’t true for me—I was suddenly alert to everything. A couple fighting on a corner and their inability to say what was going on. How beautiful and slick the stone on the bridge was after rain. The slightly satanic way Lu giggles to himself when he’s having a strange dream. I wanted to write it all down and also eat it all up. I felt super-sensitized without feeling broken open. I wondered if I was experiencing some very subtle form of mania, but if that was the case, I didn’t want to diagnose it.
Meanwhile, we were trying to make a wedding. My mother, all the way in New York, suggested a venue and enlisted her friend’s child, a very cool recent college grad named Donna, to do the planning. Donna called their equally cool friend Jacob (they both say “irrevocably chic” with a sigh when they love something), and they put together what my friend Bill said was a wedding more flamboyant than a scene from The Birdcage. It was true I had finally found someone who loved power-clashing as much as I do, and we wanted the space to reflect the intensity of our aesthetic and our emotion. All three of the gowns that I wore over the course of the evening were made by my real-life (and not just fashion life) friend Christopher Kane, and the references ran the gamut from the Beatles’ first wives, to Priscilla Presley, and Coal Miner’s Daughter.
My biggest anxieties about marriage were not, to my surprise, about upending gender norms
or the loss of personal identity or yoking myself to another human with the intention of sticking together for life. It was about the contrast between the part of me that is totally comfortable projecting my pain and the part of me that is absolutely terrified to take center stage with my joy. I had to get over a sense, carefully and self-protectively cultivated, that happiness was uncreative or maudlin or simply vulgar. I was so used to projecting my misfortunes to try and create a shared experience with both friends and audiences that being bathed in a regular and nonchemical elation was completely foreign. I hoped, like my work, my wedding was a chance to say “Look, this experience is available to you, too.” Because I didn’t do anything special to get there—besides a little therapy—except just continue being myself. Like in my bedtime fantasy, after a great war—the loss of my health and fertility, the fight to find a new normal, sobriety—I was being delivered to a distant yet safe shore.
The week of our wedding, my family descended on our home. They had never met Lu, which in regular times would be a burning red flag but in COVID times was simply the new norm. I had already spent long weekends with Lu’s family in the countryside, their brand of eccentricity making perfect sense to me. His father can discuss any topic ad nauseam from wool socks to the history of air travel. His mother, who emigrated from Peru at 19, tells better stories than Ira Glass and is the absolute first person ever to consider me “elegante.”
His sister is the only person more interested in dogs with strange faces than I am, and his brother is one of the most exacting film critics I’ve ever come across, which means dinner is never boring. And so when my family arrived, we opted for full immersion. My parents slept in the room beside us, and my sibling Cyrus and his partner crowded into our attic. (Ingrid the dog ran around like she was abusing Adderall, checking on everyone.)
Despite the aggressive form of introduction, Lu accepted the quirks of our family with the same ease with which he had accepted mine. I was abuzz with anxiety about committing wedding faux pas both ancient (bad seating chart) and modern (not enough lateral flow tests), and I could barely swallow my crumpet much less maintain a conversation. Luis maintained it for all of us, walking us across Hampstead Heath at night, shining his way with the flashlight on his iPhone and jabbering on about the history of London’s public parks.
But on the day of our wedding (almost exactly eight months into our relationship), as my parents walked in and out of our bedroom with impunity, something in him broke. He looked small and scared and, when I left the room, I heard him rush to the toilet to vomit. He returned to bed, his face streaked with wetness—“I think I just need to sleep for a few hours.”
I headed to the venue with my mother, the big white bow headband I’d had made for the
day now seeming a little bit optimistic. When we arrived, I peeked at the flowers and burst into tears—they were just as we had wanted them, blooms like fluffy parrots perched on every windowsill. But my groom was in a feverish sleep in our bed, clearly experiencing second thoughts. Would this be the moment that I realized I was right all along? That I wouldn’t get
the love story? Shame on me for still wanting it after all of these years.
He slept almost two hours longer than he was meant to. But the thing I’d forgotten was that he’s a man of his word, and when he said he just needed to sleep, he meant it. He woke up with the vim and vigor of a cheerleader. “Today we pull off our biggest gig yet and then start the gig of our lives. Let’s get married,” he texted from the Uber.
We stumbled through a rehearsal with our rabbi an hour before the ceremony, during which I barely remember exchanging a word with him. What I do remember is catching his eye as I came down the aisle, dressed in white despite my father’s reminder that “there are no virgins here,” and tears coming unbidden. I was crying because it was overwhelming. I was crying because he looked so beautiful and he was gazing at me with such awe. (I’m not sure I’d ever really been gazed at before.) But really I was crying for all the pain I was leaving behind, and because
of how easy it was to come home.