C Squared, an offshoot of the True Romantic column, is a series in which I invite couples to share stories about themselves, their experiences in love, their problems and pleasures and romantic rituals.
C Squared stands for the concept of couple comparison: A couple talks to me about their relationship and I use their stories to write about mine. Couple-hood times two. C Squared is also a way to describe the kinds of couples I’d like to know: Complicated couples, creative couples, cross-cultural couples, etc.
As a writer, I am always the subject of my artistic experiments. Being vulnerable in public is what I do. For my C Squared profile subjects, that is generally not the case, and so I will do my best to be protective of them. While I may ask my featured couple difficult questions, I will always subject myself to harder ones. Just remember: Love’s hard; be true.
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I’ve written a lot about disappointment in love. Betrayal, broken trust, crushed dreams—it’s been the stuff of this column. But while all this might be the natural result of writing about my failures in love, I don’t feel like writing about failures today. It is spring, and the whole world seems to be starting again, and so I find myself thinking about new beginnings, about perfect moments, about the sun coming out after a long and gray winter. About the future and all that it can bring. I feel like looking ahead at bright new things.
Megan and Sergio are our shiny happy subjects for today’s profile. Young and beautiful and smart, this couple seems to have the whole world ahead of them.
Megan characterizes herself as a “very passionate, emotional person.”
About her boyfriend, Megan says:
Sergio is very, very funny and charismatic, and he’s one of those extroverts who can work a room. He’s an awesome dancer and he’s in a dance troupe at Princeton…. He also loves to write, and has composed some pretty incredible short stories and poems. Lately he’s also delved more into film and making short videos with one of his roommates.
Megan also shares that
Sergio is Puerto Rican and Guatemalan, and I’m Irish. That in itself was never a problem, but Sergio is the son of very hard working, kind immigrants who did everything for their kids, including living in a dangerous and poor section of one of Connecticut’s most notorious cities in order to save money to send their kids to private schools in the suburbs outside of Bridgeport. I’ve had a comparatively easy upbringing, and there was somewhat of a cultural divide when it came to his parents and their view of his having a girlfriend, especially one from white, upper middle class Fairfield. To this day, I have not set foot in his house, because his mother feels I shouldn’t go into a bad part of Bridgeport. Despite this, we’ve made it work, and are still continuing to make it work.
But making it work isn’t always easy for Megan and Sergio. Aside from this class divide, they are also in a long-distance relationship.
Megan attends Boston College and Sergio is at Princeton. There are long stretches of time when they are apart which must, I imagine, feel a little like being buried under a Boston snowdrift.
So how do they keep their love alive? Megan says that, “I think we manage long distance by trying to remember that it’s temporary.”
Sergio says, “We manage the relationship by trying to be as ‘us’ as possible. Because we’re so far away from each other, this means setting aside time to FaceTime.”
Sergio says that some of his favorite times with Megan happened during
…our senior year and the summer after. Apart from our part-time jobs, we really had no responsibility. Naturally, we spent as much time together as possible. It was time out of time and it was just me and her for a perfect summer.
I’ve been going through my bank of “perfect moment” memories, trying to recall those times when I was truly happy, when everything just came together and life seemed worth every difficulty. There were perfect moments I spent in Japan with The Poet, walking through Kyoto and sitting in Buddhist temples. There were perfect moments with The Magician, when we lived together in France, in a small village surrounded by vineyards. And there are perfect moments now, with The Emperor, a man I met three years ago in Paris.
The Emperor and I live together in New York, where he makes films and I write books. Last month, when I was feeling down about a rejected project, The Emperor surprised me with tickets to see the opera Manon at the Met. It was an impromptu date, totally unexpected, and the surprise of it made me feel, suddenly, that anything could happen.
The Emperor and I sat in the balcony, in the first row, overlooking the stage. Starburst crystal chandeliers sparkled in fat galaxies of light above. The story of Manon is about young and passionate attraction, about being star-crossed and stupid in love, about separation and reunion, about mistakes and forgiveness. I watched the opera, feeling that I had made all of the vain and ridiculous choices Manon had made. I had been foolhardy and wrong, but I still believed—as Manon and the Chevalier des Grieux come to believe—in true love.
During the first intermission, we pulled out a split of champagne from my purse and drank it surreptitiously, feeling all the intensity of the performance. During the second intermission, when the seats around us emptied, and we were alone, The Emperor took my hand and said, in French, as if his words were an extension of Massenet’s libretto: “There’s something I want to ask you.”
My heart paused, emptied of blood, contracted and filled my body with oxygen and heat. I understood what was happening, but it seemed, for a moment, that a sweet confusion fell over me. I knew what was inside the small box The Emperor pulled from his pocket. I knew what he was going to ask me and I knew what I was going to answer. Yet, part of me did not want to know. I wanted to hold onto this in-between place, this thrilling crystalline instant, to keep it forever as it was then—perfect, untouched.
There’s no telling what time will bring for The Emperor and I. But I can say for sure that, years from now, when time tests us like it tested Manon and her Chevalier, I will always have this perfect moment to remember.
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If you would like to be featured in C Squared, please send a bio of you and your partner, a photo, and a short paragraph describing what makes your relationship C Squared material to DaniTrueRomantic@gmail.com.
You can follow Dani True at @DaniTrussoni and like True Romantic on Facebook.
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Rumpus original logo art by Max Winter.