Jumping into a long-term relationship, let alone another marriage, was not part of the plan. I wanted to explore my newly minted womanhood as freely as possible in the city infamous for short-term flings.
My decision to download Hinge, a dating app, was purely based on meeting people removed from Hollywood. Like John Singer Sargent portrait kind of beautiful. I swiped right hard and was met with a notification that she liked me too. The first few months of our relationship set the tone for how we would eventually get married. We got engaged two months into dating. Love, for us, required that nauseating combination of naivete, delusion, and fate.
Elise remains a self-respecting and grounded human—she likes her life, and her privacy. Fame, or even fame by association, was never aspirational for her; she dedicated the first half of her 20s to educating, interior design projects, and writing. On the other hand, I had never been more public-facing than in our first year together: from fashion weeks to beauty campaigns to the Met Gala. Those first few months illustrated our lifestyle differences and became a testing ground for how we would relate to the outside world.
When I nonchalantly mentioned I was engaged on a podcast in the summer of , it made an embarrassing amount of headlines, and so we decided as a couple to keep things private until we chose to invite others in. We decided that, at some point down the line, we would just elope.
We even picked up wedding dresses one day while shopping at Dover Street Market without a specific date in mind, just to have in case we felt inspired.
