Love at First Sight

“So how did you two meet?” It’s the quintessential question couples get asked, and the answers rarely disappoint. Maybe it took you twelve years, a humiliating rendition of “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” and a sprint to a New Year’s Eve kiss, like the friends-to-lovers in When Harry Met Sally. Maybe you had an unfortunate misunderstanding the day you met and harbored a delicious dislike for the other that melted into love once you actually spent time together, like Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, the archetypal enemies-to-lovers. For my husband Nate and me, it was another romcom trope: love at first sight.

Our new-love expressions make up for the horrors of flash photography. (Photo by Gina Washington).

I’ll tell our story in full someday. But here’s the version we give at dinner parties. Not wanting to hog the conversation, we start with the gist of it: We met on a Wednesday, and I moved in on Saturday. When we open like this, eyes widen, disbelieving smiles spreading like wildfire. So I go on: My dear friend Gina told me she’d met a guy who was just perfect for me and dragged me to dinner at his place. Nate usually steps in, adding that earlier that day, his roommate asked if he wanted to have dinner with a beautiful woman, to which Nate replied, “Not really.” And yet, there he was when Gina and I walked in that night.

Nate and I usually lock eyes as we get to this point of the story, because that’s what we did when the door opened. It’s called coup de foudre in French, which literally means “strike of lightning.” Far be it for me to disagree with the French on anything romance, but for me, it was a softer feeling. A whisper, a gentle certainty (if such a thing is possible) that the blue-eyed stranger before me was the love of my life. You’ve already guessed how the rest goes. We talked for hours that night, and the night after, and the one after that. I spent the fourth night at his place and never left.

I don’t think we planned for the yellow dandelions to match Gina’s glasses, but it sure works. (Photo by Nathaniel Bowler).

The love-at-first-sight story is a good one, but like the best kind of love (and wine), it gets better with age. When you’ve been together a few months and you tell it, people tend to smile at you with a slight edge of condescension, like you rushed blindly into each other’s arms and will soon realize the hormones were calling the shots. When you make it to a year, though, they take you a little more seriously, and a little more seriously each year after that.

Nate and I met in April of 1999. Not being numbers people, we didn’t note the actual date. I know it happened on a Wednesday, and that I was 21 and he 22. We were kids and now we’re adults who’ve spent a quarter of a century together (the best, most delightful years of our lives). These days when we tell this story, it’s not the speed at which we got together that interests people, but how long it has lasted. For me, though, it’s less about time than about how we’ve woven every thread of our beings into something colorful, messy, and resilient. And, of course, happy. Or as happy as 25 years of a shared life can get. And that’s pretty happy, as it turns out.

Unearthed Photo

Gina has always had a thing for fun lopsided photos. (Photo by Gina Washington).

Nate used to rent a little white house about a 20-minute drive from Ohio University’s campus. To get there, he drove us up rural hills with quaint farmhouses, the trees bursting with spring for weeks after we met. I never did photograph the drive (these were the days of film photography, and I was an impoverished college student), but I think of those hills whenever I see this photo, which Gina took in Nate’s yard a few days after I moved in. I love the pink and white blossoms in the background. The light is harsh, causing us to have the dreaded raccoon eyes of portrait photography. Why we thought noon was the right time for a photo, I’ll never know. Still, our closeness is undeniable, and I’ll always take emotion over aesthetics in a photo (or in most things).

Issue 6 of constellations is out!

Engaging in the Socratic Method with Pitt PhD student Sidra Arshad during our Cultural Rhetorics Seminar. (Photo by Helena Mazzarella).

Since 2018, I’ve been the editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing space. We are a journal that blends theory with storytelling as we try to break down our share of boundaries and publish scholarship that touches the heart as much as it challenges the intellect. Check out “Performances and Personas: An Introduction to Issue 6 of constellations,” where I discuss the incredible pieces we published in our sixth issue and muse on the constant reinvention hustle we’re asked to perform as we project the identities we want to become.

David Sedaris Makes Us Laugh and Then Laugh Some More

At some point after having kids, Nate and I decided not to give each other Christmas presents. It made more sense to spend our holiday budget on the kids and on everyone else. This year we decided to return to marital gift-giving, and Nate got us tickets to see David Sedaris. The anticipation of our evening with David was a carrot dangling before me all year, and he was even funnier and more exuberantly curmudgeonly than I’d imagined. The following day, the boys loved the message he had for them when he signed their book. So the evening turned out to be a gift for the boys after all. And for us. The best kind of gift, with everyone getting something.

Santiago’s Odyssey of the Mind Continues

A few weeks ago, we drove to the Poconos Mountains (right by The Office’s Scranton, though we had no Michael Scott sightings). Then we spent the day surrounded by hundreds of smart, creative kids from all around Pennsylvania for the state’s Odyssey of the Mind competition. It was a day of steep ups and downs that Santiago said was one of the best of his life.

Stories that Transfixed Me (and May Transfix You)

Christa Comes Out of Her Shell by Abbi Waxman

If you want root for a brilliant, witty, endearingly self-deprecating protagonist, look no further than Christa Barnet, a reclusive scientist tucked away on a remote island studying snails, who gets pulled back home when her father, who disappeared when she was a toddler, reappears under circumstances as murky as those of his vanishing. Christa faces tricky family reunions and delectable romance while trying to keep away the journalists and paparazzi who can’t get enough of her father’s miraculous return. It’s a chaotic, fabulous romp bound to make you laugh—and cry a little.

Reservation Dogs, created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi

As a Venezuelan woman living in the US, I’ve struggled to explain magical realism to my children without having them read Gabriel García Márquez (which at 12 and 9, they’re way too young for). Enter Reservation Dogs, the three-season series that follows four indigenous teens in an Oklahoma reservation—Bear (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Ellora (Devery Jacobs), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis), and Cheese (Lane Factor)—as they heal from their friend’s suicide. Sound depressing? It isn’t. It’s funny and poignant and brimming with spirits and creatures that are neither strange nor fantastic. Just a way of life for those of us who grew up in worlds where the cult of rationality is not the law of the land, but one among many possible ways of being, seeing, and loving.