When he pulled up in front of my duplex in Van Nuys, his teal Ford Tempo gleaming in the dappled fall sun, a wave of first-date excitement flooded my system.
Leaning over the center console, he opened the passenger door.
“Sorry,” he said cheerfully, “I threw up on that seat in the 405 yesterday, but I think I almost cleaned it up.”
I paused, looked at the seat and then back at his hopeful, serious face.
“I ate vitamins on an empty stomach and then sat in traffic,” he said with a shrug.
Well, I thought, at least they were partially digested vitamins and not a carne asada burrito. It could be worse.
Deciding to be the cool girl, I slid into the not-quite-clean seat and took a deep breath.
Brian was 6-foot-4 and a dark, curly-haired musician with a magnetic stage presence. We met through a mutual friend from his band, a guy who made me laugh by drawing inappropriate pictures in my spiral notebooks in my theater classes at Cal State Northridge.
The week before, I saw them play in Calabasas and felt something change. On stage, Brian closed his eyes as he sang, swaying slightly off beat as his wild waves caught the light. I was in love.
Our first date took place on a chic vintage couch in a cafe rumored to have once belonged to someone from the punk-rock band NOFX. We take a sip of tea. This man had never had a sip of alcohol in his life, by choice, which seemed both strange and wildly exotic to me at the time. I was worried that the absence of cocktails would make the night uncomfortable. Instead, we talked for hours, our words jumbled together as if we'd been rehearsing for years.
After six months, he moved into my apartment. From there we jumped to Venice, then to Marina del Rey and finally to Mar Vista, where we bought our second home and established ourselves as people who understood fences. Two extraordinary kids later, we had built something that looked, from the outside, like a Hallmark movie with much better music. I would stay in our kitchen at dusk, as the sea layer settled, calmly loading the dishwasher in a life I hadn't necessarily seen for myself.
Then life, as it always does, began to press.
In 2019, my mother-in-law suffered a stroke and moved into our house while she recovered. I love her deeply and was grateful that we were able to care for her. However. The care inside a small West Los Angeles “bungalow” (as my MIL kindly called it) magnified everything from love to exhaustion. We survived, but we hadn't yet fully exhaled when the COVID-19 pandemic hit as a cosmic reminder of how life loves dramatic arcs.
Suddenly, we were always home. Always in each other's line of sight, always negotiating a space that didn't exist. I would often escape to our small garden to do another DIY project, clutching coffee or whiskey like it was a flotation device and internally shouting in their direction: “Why are you always here?”
My chronic illness flared up and fear hung over me like smog. Both of our parents were aging rapidly and reminded us of our own mortality. Grief covered everything, but we kept the kids stable and the house running. We just kept showing up as best we could.
However, somewhere along the way, large parts of ourselves disappeared.
In 2023, I fled to Mexico City with a friend. In the photographs from that week, I barely recognize the woman looking back at me. She was heavy and pale; his eyes were dull and empty. I realized that I had become a highly efficient machine for other people's needs and had lost count of my own.
Months later, on a routine mental health walk near Mar Vista Park, I heard a podcast clip that stopped me in my tracks. “Life is a melting ice cube,” Mel Robbins said casually.
I physically froze on the sidewalk.
An ice cube melting.
Every time I passed that corner I thought about it, about how this life was disappearing, whether we were awake inside it or not.
That night I told Brian that something had to change. I didn't know what it meant. I just knew I couldn't continue living a version of life that looked like survival instead of participation.
Like the friend he's always been, he listened.
Over the next year, we experimented. We try to reshape our marriage into something more expansive. We tried an open relationship. We try to rediscover the spark that once felt effortless. Instead, what we discovered was that the truest thing between us had always been friendship.
Then we separated.
This is the part people don't expect to hear: He didn't destroy us.
Somehow, without the pressure of being everything for each other, we get better. We are kinder and more honest. We parent as a team that vacations together and will soon be heading to Coachella to complain about bus lines in the midst of total exhaustion once again.
I turned 50 in the midst of falling apart, trapped somewhere in the chaos of a painful second surgery and the death of my mother. To mark the end of an important season in my life, I went to Spain for two months. I walked through unknown streets with the music carrying me on its wings, I had dinner at 10 at night and I remembered who I was when no one needed me to be anything in particular.
I came home a different person.
Now Brian and I are dating other people. We talk on the phone most days about kids, life, and whatever absurd situations the world throws at us. We take it day by day, week by week, like adults who have finally accepted that certainty is an illusion.
Someone recently called our story “so LA”
I smiled.
Los Angeles has always been a city of reinvention, of artists and dreamers, and of people brave enough to admit when something needs to evolve. This city taught me how to chase a musician in a teal Ford Tempo. It also taught me how to start a family and how to let go without burning everything down.
Love doesn't always look the way we expect. Sometimes it transforms and other times it softens into something more stable and less cinematic.
Evolution is not failure; It is movement, and movement (even when it hurts) is proof that you are still alive within your life.
Precisely in Los Angeles, I know how to start again.
The author is a novelist and essayist based in Los Angeles. She writes about love, reinvention, and modern relationships. Find her on Instagram: @marykathrynholmes.
Los Angeles Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the Los Angeles area, and we want to hear your true story. We paid $400 for a published essay. Email [email protected]. You can find shipping guidelines. here. You can find previous columns. here.
