AS we floated in a Moroccan-tiled pool on the outskirts of Palm Springs, Calif., my boyfriend of three months told me about an old English custom in which two people are married if they chant “I marry thee” three times, clap in unison and kiss. Finding his story charming and amusing, I laughed.

David and I had met on a film set in Los Angeles. Like me, he was a refugee from academia. I was attracted by his salt-and-pepper hair as much as by his insistent optimism and joie de vivre in the face of the unknown, and we quickly developed a comfortable repartee.

But that afternoon in Palm Springs, I sensed something was different. Only after a moment of awkward silence did I realize that David was proposing to me. He wanted us to make a home together.

For me the concept of home is loaded. My childhood home was an isolated farmhouse in north Texas where I helped my father build barbed-wire fences and sack cottonseed for the cattle’s winter feeding, where mesquite trees grew like weeds and yellowed pastures stretched for miles. But most of all, home had been a place dominated by my mother’s unpredictable bouts of depression, a place that, for as long as I could remember, I wanted to escape.