We were on Skype when the idea first came up. She was in Germany with four months left of her university year abroad, eating her dinner. I was huddled up on my bed in Bristol, frowning while I went through the UK’s visa requirements for Australians again. I’d been in Bristol a year: one of two that I got for free as part of my young person’s holiday working visa. I was trying to figure out if there was any way I could convince the nonprofit arts organization I worked for to sponsor me for a new visa. It was looking unlikely. Scanning through the PDFs, I frowned, rubbed my hand over my mouth and said, “We might just have to get married.”



My girlfriend raised her eyebrows. “That better not have been a proposal.”

But it was one — as close as it would come, delivered online and without a ring or token, like too many of our relationship milestones.

We met in the spring of 2013, when I was doing my Grand Tour of Europe, breathless with my own daring and arrogance. At the time, I was certain that I would never be in a relationship in my life, let alone a marriage. I’d decided that I was the kind of freewheeling spirit who loved too deeply and generously to be restricted to any kind of heteronormative structure. Besides, I wasn’t sure I was capable of romance. (I was 20, in case that is not immediately obvious.)

Then I went to stay with a friend-of-a-friend in Bristol, a British student who had space on her floor for me to crash. When she met me at the train station, she was tall and pretty with shabby leopard print gloves. We started talking immediately and then never shut up, wandering around Bristol's hills but only really looking at each other, spending late nights out and lazy mornings in. She was smarter than me, and funnier; she was brilliant on politics; she laughed that she could talk me into anything. But I ended up talking her into coming with me across the continent, dipping in and out of my life in Bristol, Prague, London.

I was newly reluctant to keep traveling. I wanted to stop and stare, I wanted to sit with her for hours in a pub, I wanted to spend days in bed. For the first time in nine months of traveling and carousing my way across the northern hemisphere, I wanted to stay.

But I couldn’t. After only about two weeks total spent together, I went back to Australia to finish my final year of university, and she continued studying in the UK.