Cheers to Love

Joel and I met in February 2020, in those times we now refer to as pre-Covid. On our first date, we took an afternoon drive out to Milam & Greene distillery for a whisky tasting. It went so well that we stopped at another distillery on the way back. Their whisky wasn't worth our interest, but the conversation certainly was. By the time we were finally back in Austin, neither of us wanted the date to end. We decided to have dinner at Loro, and somehow managed to shut the place down, even though we'd arrived early. Roughly 10 hours after we started, you could safely say that it was a great first date. And then life happened. For one reason and another, we didn't schedule that second date. Meanwhile, the global pandemic started and things got weird. In June 2020, I reached out to Joel to see how he was doing and whether he'd decided to stay in the USA or to return to Scandinavia. He'd stayed, and he'd love to catch up. I asked him out on a second first date. It was the first time I'd ever asked a guy out. Evidently, I made the right choice. Our date was outside in July in Texas, thanks to Covid precautions. As we ate Texas BBQ on the lake and I sweated off all of the makeup I'd carefully applied, we picked back up as though no time had passed. It was our second and last first date.

Joel & I visited Sweden in July, where I met his family and saw where he grew up. On our last night, after dinner while it was still sunny at 9pm, Joel suggested we head over to Viken, where his sister, her boyfriend and his brother were staying at his grandparents' summer house. I objected. We had an early flight, we needed to pack and get some sleep...but he persisted, and off we went. As the sun slowly began its descent, we pulled into the harbor. Joel suggested we walk along the pier one last time. We walked out to its edge, where you could see Denmark with Shakespeare's Elsinore Castle just across the sea. As the sun finally dipped below the horizon and the views blurred, our focus was solely on one another. Joel asked me to share my life with him. And I couldn't imagine life without him.