TOMI & EMILY

Our story starts where all great modern love stories do: Hinge.

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We matched in the Spring. On our first date, Tomi asked me to meet him at a jazz bar  in the Haight. I made sure to arrive 15 minutes after the time he had told me, so as to ensure I wasn't there first. When I did finally arrive, I found him standing outside, waiting, chatting to the bouncer. What struck me in that very first moment I ever saw him is what I would end up falling in love with: his gentle enthusiasm for people and for life. Tomi is somehow so calm and yet so engaged--he has both a childlike wonder and a steadiness of a man three times his age, which, I swear, all came across within a minute of knowing him.

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Something clicked for me right away. I had a sort of gut feeling that Tomi was very important in some way. 

 

So important, that I didn't let two days go by without asking to see him again. 

 

Late Sunday night, he picked me up and, without telling him where we were going, I directed him to a virtually empty Palace of Fine Arts. We walked around until we were at the back and I coaxed him to climb up on one of the walls with me, and we sat there, talking for hours. 

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This is the spot he would bring me back to a year later to celebrate our first anniversary, the year after that on our second anniversary, and then again, almost three years after meeting, to ask me to be his wife.

 

But before all that, I would tell him I'd stopped going on dates with anyone else, that I'd like to go on dates only with him, and he'd be overwhelmed, having moved to SF only a few months prior, at the thought of jumping into a relationship. He'd tell me he wasn't interested in me in that way, and I'd propose, certain that I needed him in my life in some capacity, that we be friends. He'd think I was saying it only to be nice, and would later find out that I was indeed very serious about being his friend, and he'd become very serious about being mine. 

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We'd meet each others' friends, send each other songs, go to the movies, share books. He'd DJ my house warming party, I'd make him dinner in return. There was an easiness to all of it. I'd alway wish that maybe he'd change his mind about us, but never dare pressure him for fear of losing him.

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That was, until the Fall, when I went to Europe. I was shocked at how jarring it was to be away from Tomi, to not be able to talk to him whenever I pleased. When we did get the chance to talk, I would vomit out the entire days' worth of thoughts I'd been saving for him. Slowly, and then undeniably, he had become the singular person on this Earth with whom I wanted to share everything in my life.

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I believe my exact message to him, one late night in Paris, went something like "Are you sure we shouldn't date?" To which he responded that, no, he wasn't sure of that at all. ​​

 

It didn't take long after that for me to tell him that I loved him--I'd been falling in love with him all year.  I still remember the sound of the sigh of relief he let out after I said it--as though finally, we could be done with the carefulness of it all, and just love one another entirely--before whispering it back.

 

​Being with him would change me, fundamentally and entirely. My way of being in this world would be irreversibly altered in the years that would come. 

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I ask him all the time to tell me when it was that he fell in love with me, when he changed his mind, or when it became clear that there was something more between us. He tells me the same thing every time I ask: there was no exact moment. In the same way no one notices their own getting taller. It was a slow and quiet build to something so all-consuming, there was almost no remembering a time when it wasn't there. 

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