I was ten years old when Mom married my stepdad, Todd. They’re still married today. Todd taught me how to balance a checkbook and how to put together model cars and airplanes, and he encouraged me to study science and read more. Todd brought my mom love and stability. He brought an intellectual curiosity, a sharp sense of humor, and a paternal voice to me and Michel.
Looking back at Amy’s and my marriage, it would be tempting to surmise that I had a model for what it meant to be in a healthy relationship, and even what it takes to make a marriage work. Insert sound of game-show buzzer here: wrong. I can’t quite pinpoint how I was ready to enter my relationship with Amy when I did. I was a mere kid at twenty-six. Reflecting back on the question now, it occurs to me that it is probably a combination of many factors—watching 1970s sitcoms, seeing some of my friends’ parents, being solid in my own skin, my youthful ignorance, and falling in love with Amy. Oh, and a lot of luck. When I met Amy’s family, I subconsciously thought, “Wow, if Amy came from this much love and warmth, maybe we could create this too.”
Before I met Amy, I was what I’ve come to call a serial monogamist, starting with my first girlfriend in eighth grade, then in high school, followed by a long relationship in college. That is as serious as you can get when marriage isn’t even on your radar. My mom had modeled for me what it was to be kind to people. My sister did as well. Perhaps part of me did not want the contentiousness of what I saw my mom and dad go through as a divorced couple. Maybe, if I am being honest with myself, I did not want to be like my dad when it came to relationships and women. Part of it was that I was a calm, openhearted guy who saw that women were far superior to us dudes, and a hell of a lot of fun to be around.
All that is to say that even though I was not ready when I first met Amy (I just never thought this would happen in my twenties), the process of falling in love and getting close to someone was not foreign to me. We were lucky. We fell in love, and I was all in.
I was in my third year of law school in Chicago when I got a call from “Uncle John.” I’d known him since I was a kid—he’d dated my mom in the 1970s, when she was single—and unbeknownst to me until that day, he was apparently a modern-day male yenta.
It seemed his childhood friend Paul Krouse had a daughter named Amy, an advertising copywriter who’d just moved back to Chicago from San Francisco. I was twenty-four years old and single. Amy was twenty-four years old and single. John had known her since she was a kid too, and he had a premonition that she and I would hit it off.
I was slammed, in the throes of studying for the Illinois bar exam, but as a favor to John, I took down Amy’s phone number, called her, and asked her out.
Our first date, the first and only blind date of my life, was on July 2, 1989.
I picked Amy up in my VW Golf (manual transmission, stick shift). My first impressions were that she was super cute, tiny, full of energy, and immediately easy to talk to. She had long brown hair, not thick, that went beyond her shoulders. Dinner was at Jimmy and Johnnie’s, an Italian restaurant that no longer exists. I remember almost everything about that dinner, from the food to the atmosphere to the company to the fact that Chicago Cubs first baseman Mark Grace was there, a few tables away. Then it was on to B.L.U.E.S., an intimate live blues music venue on Halsted Street.
It was a pretty special evening. Amy wrote, much later, that she knew she wanted to marry me by the time we finished eating. I knew I wanted to marry her a year later.
In many ways that summer was not an ideal time for me to start a relationship. I was preoccupied with my studies and lived almost every waking moment in the school’s law library. Standardized tests in general are not my jam. Or, to put it another way, I’m not good at them at all. I knew that I had to devote most of my time to getting ready for this test.
But from that first date, I knew that Amy was too good not to prioritize. So in spite of my workload, Amy and I stayed in touch and saw one another quite a few times. I’d never met anyone like her. It turned out she wasn’t just super cute, tiny, full of energy, and easy to talk to. She was also smart, revealed a curiosity about pretty much everything, and possessed a contagious passion for life.
How I still have my original note of Amy’s phone number, I have no idea, but here it is, misspelled last name and all.
I remember our first kiss. We had been out on a bunch of dates throughout the summer and into the fall. I was living in a microscopic studio apartment near school, in Chicago’s South Loop. The apartment was very small, like Amy herself. The kitchen was Manhattan size. My futon bed lived under the table in the main room. That’s where I slept, under that table. The wall was covered with a huge chart I’d written out of the rule against perpetuities, an obscure probate precedent that I had to learn for the bar exam, with absurd phrases like “fertile octogenarian” and “unborn widow.”
Amy and her ever-present brown backpack had come to visit. This wasn’t just any backpack. This thing had a history. She’d bought it in Greece during her college semester abroad, and you knew it had stories to tell. (It collected a lot more of them, since she kept right on carrying it for the next twenty-seven years.)
When the time came for her to leave, she slung the backpack over her shoulder, and I walked her to the door. As we stood in the open doorway, I moved in to kiss her, during which that big old bag slid off her shoulder and crashed, yanking her whole arm down with it.
It didn’t stop us.
I’d planned a trip to celebrate the bar exam being mercifully over with. I was going to get in my VW and drive to the East Coast—first to Washington, DC, where I went to college; on to the Cape and Martha’s Vineyard, where I had some friends; and then on to Boston and Buffalo. The trip lasted a few weeks. At this point, it felt like Amy and I were on solid footing in the relationship. Perhaps part of what brought clarity was the separation, my time to reflect on what was happening between us. I wanted her in my life, but thoughts of marriage, etc., were not in my mind. Amy and I corresponded during my trip. Good old-fashioned handwritten letters.
What is it about letters? Is it just the knowledge that physically putting a writing instrument to a piece of paper is a deliberate act, a gesture that requires forethought, and some intentional planning? Am I just old-fashioned? The more we communicate these days without writing at all—emojis, for example, and an endless stream of mystifying acronyms—the more meaningful the process of actually sitting down and writing a letter feels to me. Even emails, which now have algorithmic automatic response mechanisms, are hastily, carelessly written and sent, grammatical errors be damned.
Courtesy of Tom Lichtenheld
Writing letters to Amy felt good, as if I was sharing my world with her in a literal and emotional way. And receiving letters from her was exciting on several levels, from the anticipation of opening the mailbox to the sight of her handwriting to the joy of sitting down to soak up her words.
An excerpt from a letter entitled “Monday,” for example:
I am thinking about you. Kind of a lot. (How can I not with Raphael perched on top of my computer?!) Love, Amy R. Krouse.
(Raphael, by the way, was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle I’d given her, for some reason I can’t begin to remember.)