During my study-abroad year in London, I worked as a bartender, the latest in a string of unglamorous minimum-wage gigs that kept me afloat through college. Henry, a working-class Londoner, was my manager.
Even with a scholarship to attend Smith College, I still needed paychecks and student loans to cover costs. I was used to money being tight; my parents’ small farm was their life’s work but never very profitable. Most years, my sisters and I qualified for free lunch at school. I can remember my mother tearing up at the grocery store checkout once, when she saw the total.
In London, when my school’s monthlong exam marathon began, I picked up bar shifts that the other students had dropped to study. The nights I used to spend Skyping with my boyfriend in Massachusetts I now spent with Henry in a mostly empty bar.
I loved my London life and wanted to stay, but I had a flight home at the end of May, a summer job, a year left at college and a boyfriend waiting for me. It all felt so mundane, especially when the alternative was falling slowly in love with the handsome, moody bar manager.
Henry and I never crossed any lines, but we talked for hours. He told me about his life, his hardships and his Type-1 diabetes, which he had to manage carefully. My classmates were preparing for summers in Ibiza, but Henry was like me — working to live, earning his way. He felt like a little oasis, a piece of London I could afford. The day I left for home, he texted: “Coffee at Paddington before your train leaves?”
I couldn’t reply because my phone was out of credit. I waited for him by the station entrance, wearing sunglasses so the stoic London commuters couldn’t see me crying.
He arrived too late. The train to Heathrow was already gliding west with me on it.
That’s the part of our story that feels like a romance — a service industry rom-com, a side plot in “Love Actually.”
Over the next year, my college relationship faded, but Henry and I kept in touch. After graduation, I returned to London for a master’s program — and for him. He helped me move into a flat with more mice than square footage. I could hardly pay for it, but I loved living in London again.
By spring, I had moved in with Henry and his flatmates. Smarter to split rent. Henry was hesitant, but I knew we had to.
A movie montage of our next three years could easily fit in that rom-com. Windy walks along the Thames. Celebrating my first full-time job. A sunny trip to a friend’s family villa in France. Our first just-us apartment inside an old stone church, where we had two enormous stained-glass windows and two tiny kittens. Henry in London’s diamond district, getting my mother’s engagement ring reset for me.
In reality, the church flat was small, damp and too expensive even with two salaries. I got a second job. I spent the vacation with friends in France secretly calling my sister for a $200 loan to plug my overdrawn account.
We would never have survived those lean years, broke as we were, without loving each other deeply. But if our paycheck-to-paycheck life needed love to make it livable, I also wonder if the reverse was true: Did our relationship benefit from the constant teamwork required to make it work? We couldn’t afford to live without each other, and, in a way, that bonded us.
But we could never get ahead. Getting engaged and moving to the U.S. was my fix, our next plan. I was sure things would be better, easier, more affordable once we moved to Massachusetts.
Stateside, we both found jobs closer to our interests — Henry’s in tech, mine in editing — but little changed about our threadbare finances. Henry’s diabetes care, free in the U.K., was expensive and exhausting here, a barrage of insurance calls, denials and appeals. The homepage on my laptop, my first stop every morning for years, was a calendar of bills and expenses.
I proposed a new fix, my Hail Mary: Move in with my parents for a year, cats and all, to save and break out of the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle.
The cats loved the wood stove, and I loved being with family after years away. Henry lived like a guest in the house, uprooted and transplanted again. Our relationship suffered, but we did begin to feel the lightness that comes from having a comma in your bank balance.
Then my mother’s cancer returned for the final time and our cats developed a mysterious illness that killed them both, expensively, over long stays at the veterinary hospital. My parents’ home became a hospice; Henry and I barely had enough left in our accounts to rent an apartment. My sister lent us the security deposit.
By the time I paid her back, a year and a half later, it was only me living there.
When Henry told me he was leaving, I scoffed at the things he said he needed: space, independence, self-sufficiency.
“Grow up,” I said. “That’s movie stuff.” It felt selfish to want anything beyond safety, security, solvency. Hadn’t we proven that we could live on nothing and needed little? “Why do you suddenly need more?”
“I just do,” he said. “You probably do too.”
I fled to my childhood bedroom in the house where my mother had died just a year before, while a few towns over Henry packed his things, peeling apart the life I had believed we were building together. I grieved my marriage and my mother. How could I take off the ring that had been her love story, and then mine? Both were over now.
I thought Henry and I were unbreakable, bound by the same enduring hardships we had once joked about behind the bar. Our only battle could be us against the world.
I didn’t see the more everyday battles of marriage: resentment, complacency, codependence. The insidious softening from romance to roommate. I had a great ear when it came to hearing a new rattle in the car that might mean repairs. But I hadn’t heard what Henry had been saying for months: that he wasn’t happy, that he felt managed and trapped, that he wanted a life of his own.
If I had paused to listen, I might even have heard the same worries rattling around inside me.
That year, I had to reframe everything. Losing my mother meant admitting that the upward trajectory I had always imagined — every year better than the last, building toward a happy, easier life — didn’t exist. I had been sure that sufficient income was the determiner of future happiness; not because I overvalued money, but because that was all I lacked. I had never considered that the things that mattered and the people I needed would die or disappear. And there was no fix for that, nothing I could do.
Which was terrifying, but maybe it could be liberating, too?
I told my therapist that whatever happened in the long run between Henry and me would be for the best.
“You’re so optimistic,” she said, surprised.
I shrugged. “It doesn’t feel like optimism.”
What it felt like was surrender. The things I had been so sure I could keep at bay with long hours and careful planning — suffering, failure, loss — had all come to ruin me. But there I was in her office, somehow, still in the black. Still going. It was a kind of hubris, a wave I could ride. I trusted it to carry me forward.
Five years later, I went back to London to see friends. I stayed with Henry’s best friend’s mother for a few days, four streets down from our damp church flat. I called him from the fancy Marks & Spencer grocery store by our old Tube station, proof the neighborhood had fully gentrified.
He had seen the grocery store already when visiting a few months after his father died. Unable to fly back in time, he’d watched on Zoom as his family gathered at the crematory. He asked me to come over for it; the two of us sat together on the old couch I’d found on Craigslist while furnishing our first stateside apartment. One of my early fixes for us.
The last thing I fixed for us was our amicable, no-lawyers divorce. The paperwork was so complicated that we both left the court silly with relief. Henry snapped a smiling selfie of us in the parking lot.
We both have new cats and new partners and new lives now. Happier homes, hardier cars. It surprises people, sometimes, that we have stayed friends. It doesn’t surprise me. It was easy to forgive Henry for wanting more, once I realized I did, too.
Emily Everett, a writer who lives in Northampton, Mass., recently published her first novel, “All That Life Can Afford.”
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