It was a warm Roman October afternoon, and I had no idea that my life was about to change forever.
My business partner at the time told me that we were going to meet a friend of his to talk about “potential work synergies”. He told me that he was in charge of “institutional relations between companies and the government”; I immediately imagined a pot-bellied and slightly slimy middle-aged man. But it’s not like I really cared what he looked like either: I had been with another for eight years, another whom I was living with and with whom I had long-term plans for the future.
I will never forget my surprise when he opened the door to his office: he not only had nothing to do with the image I had created of him, but was actually very handsome. We met three more times for work, each for just a little over 15 minutes and always in the company of other people. It was only at the end of the third meeting, by chance and in the last five minutes before we waved goodbye, that I discovered that he had met my uncle (who is no longer here), twenty years earlier. I felt a spark, but pushed it to the back of my head. He invited us to meet his other clients, and our fourth meeting was at a glitzy Christmas party inside a famous Roman hotel. As he greeted me, he let his hand slide down my back, and, in that instant, I realized that the film that had taken shape in my head was not just a film.
Our fifth meeting, just before Christmas, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I went to his office–for the first time alone, a pure coincidence–for what was supposed to be a simple, pre-holiday farewell lunch with his staff. When I arrived, he told me he wanted to give me something, and, from under his desk, he pulled out a gift, two mid-nineteenth-century engravings with my initials. Trembling, I hugged him and did not know what else to say. At lunch, sitting elbow to elbow, the tension was so great that I could hear my heartbeat in my ears. That evening, we texted each other saying we both felt we had found a soulmate.
We met again, furtively, on December 23rd in a historic pastry shop in Rome, sat at the tables in the back room, and talked for two hours straight without ever taking a breath. We had our first kiss. And then I had to leave for the Christmas holidays I had planned with my partner, my train due at 5 PM, and he for his holiday in the mountains with someone he had been seeing for a few months. We promised to resolve both our situations over the holidays and meet again, free, in January.
I spent a harrowing holiday amidst the sorrow of having to tell a person who loved me, and who thought he would spend his life with me, that I loved him dearly, but in a brotherly way, not as a partner. I resolved my situation on January 2nd–part of my heart was broken, but the other felt alive as never before. On January 9th, I went for dinner at his house and never looked back. We got married one and a half years later.
