Freezing your eggs is not sexy. Neither the existential questions it imposes nor the toll it takes on your body are conducive to dating.
However, when I met Graham on an application last February, the transparency was refreshing. He explained that he had just gotten divorced and was co-parenting his two children in London. He would be in Los Angeles during a few intervals throughout the year, working as an orchestrator on a hit franchise film.
I was equally frank about starting my first egg freezing cycle, unsure how I would respond to all the hormones I was going to be injected with. He was very thoughtful and curious; The conversation flowed. I wanted to have a few drinks with him before he left town until the summer, even if he couldn't drink. Bloated and fatigued, I met him on a Saturday at a brewery equidistant from my apartment in Palms and his hotel in Century City.
Even though I thought he was a great guy, I wasn't in any emotional state to gauge romantic chemistry. Mandatory celibacy aside, preserving my fertility at age 35 and reflecting on what it meant for potential partners had clouded my usual fervor. I think he kissed me after walking me to my car, saying he'd love to see me again when he got back, but most of the date was forgotten in the months that followed.
He came back and contacted me in August, where he again found me quite depressed. I told him I wasn't sure where I stood on casual dating, but he still insisted on taking me out to dinner, no strings attached. I think I surprised us both by wanting to take our meeting further that night.
When I mentioned contraception, he revealed that he had had a vasectomy. I don't remember if I had mentioned before that I didn't want any more kids, but either way, I didn't think about that as far as I was concerned. I just thought it was incredibly presumptuous that he thought he would never change a diaper again.
We saw each other once or twice a week for the rest of the month, mostly at dinner or breakfast at the Westfield shopping center, where it was cheaper to park than having valet at his hotel around the corner, despite all the time I inevitably spent looking for my car.
When he moved to a boutique hotel in Burbank, we ate in the restaurant row on that stretch of Riverside Drive. One night during a Japanese barbecue, where he forgot to tell me that Brendan Fraser was sitting in front of us the entire time, we discussed what we were looking for long term. I noticed that our agreement could be working very well because we knew it was temporary. Since we lived in different cities and were in different chapters of our lives, we could simply enjoy our time, without reconciling opposing ambitions.
He returned to London for a few weeks but soon returned to Los Angeles for a longer period. We celebrated his 40th birthday with his friends from work in a bar in Venice. He took me to see Dudamel conduct Mahler's Second Symphony at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. We had tea at the Huntington before strolling through the gardens and buying kitschy socks in the gift shop. Although there were still boundaries I maintained given the circumstances, our connection felt unexpectedly effortless.
In October, I talked to my clinic about doing another round of egg freezing. I was prescribed birth control pills to delay the onset while traveling for some weddings in my homeland, the East Coast. I was glad that a second cycle did not prohibit me from enjoying my last days with Graham, whom I already missed.
But now he was working New Zealand hours while the crew finalized the film. Finishing his soundtrack simultaneously was much more exhausting than I anticipated. I never imagined that one of the most prolific directors in the world would single-handedly stop me from getting laid. I managed to take Graham for a few hours at Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios, but that wasn't the time or place to reflect on our feelings.
He invited me to an industry concert on his last night in town, where I saw him in his element, conducting the score he had orchestrated and wearing the socks I had bought him. The woman sitting next to me commented on what a great director he was and asked him his name. I gave it to him and identified him as my friend, despite how fun I imagined it would be to say I was sleeping with him.
I had developed a fondness for Los Angeles' many donut shops, so I brought a case of Sidecar to their hotel. While I was packing our bags, we casually ruled out possible ways to meet. Maybe at an upcoming concert he had in Miami, or at a mid-ride meeting the next time he was in New York? Fate simply did not give us the time or energy to arrange things carefully. He returned to his house and his children the next day, and I to a new series of hormone injections.
Despite the ocean and continent that now separated us, it seemed like I was losing Graham more to bad timing than time zones. It's hard to imagine two people more separate than one who surgically altered her body to no longer procreate and the other who medically pushed her body to new limits to have the opportunity to do so.
Once I recovered from my recovery, I asked Graham to call me to properly process our time together. A month after we said goodbye at his Burbank hotel, he spoke to me from his Paris hotel before the film's European premiere. Although we couldn't say with certainty when our dynamic changed into something deeper, we agreed that it did. We felt better confirming that these feelings were mutual, but we were still at the same impasse that had been there from the beginning.
I allowed myself to be more vulnerable with him than I had ever been before and shared with him how important it was to me to have children and what a source of distress it had been to not have had them yet. Although he loved his children, whose faces and personalities he had come to know through their many photos and anecdotes, he had long ago decided he was done.
Still, he reiterated how grateful he was to have met me and how much I had enriched his time in Los Angeles beyond his many hours in the studio. He's almost certain he'll go back to work at some point, although he doesn't know when, let alone where any of us will be in our love lives.
But when that time comes, if neither of us is lucky enough to have found someone whose goals align better, with whom things feel just as easy, you can share your time in Los Angeles with me.
The author is a New York writer and producer living in Los Angeles, at the intersection of Palms, Culver City, and Cheviot Hills. Find it there or at jamiedeline.com and on instagram @jamiedeline.
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