TESSA | THEO
It was several years ago, right after Darling Designs really went big. We were approached with a request to be a keynote speaker for the fashion and merchandising department at Cornell and I can't even remember why it was just me who ended up attending. That was where I met him, on campus, and we hit it off and he asked me to grab a drink with him after the seminar.
It was honestly kind of a whirlwind after that. I spent a lot of weekends visiting him in Ithaca, but I never asked him to visit me in NYC. Mostly because I knew if he came there, our relationship would belong to everyone and my notoriety was still so new at the time. I wasn't ready to share my private life with the world and so I kept him separate, didn't let him into the life I lived when I wasn't with him. And he fell for the person I marketed myself to be.
He asked me to marry him one Friday night when I'd flown out to spend the weekend with him. And I guess I just loved the idea of being wanted and loved and the romance of it that I said yes. We were going to do it that Sunday, just fly somewhere and find someone to marry us. I left for NYC because of course I had to get in touch with Abby and Dottie and I needed them to be there for it, but I started thinking about the fact that they'd never even met him. And that I'd never told him which book I always had waiting for me on my nightstand, or how I had my appendix removed when I was eight, or why I'd even become a fashion designer to begin with. There were so many things I'd never told him and I realized that he'd only asked a part of me to marry him and it wasn't fair to either of us to be okay with that.
When I landed at JFK, I texted him and told him that I was sorry. And then I didn't see him again until we moved to Dunhaven and I realized that I didn't really know him, either. Like the fact that he was born in Dunhaven, VA and that was where he'd moved back to.