Deep in the heart of the world's first lockdown, Ella Fox-Martens flew from Perth to London to move in with a man she'd fallen in love with but had never met. This is their love story.
I first met Jacob in the arrival terminal at Heathrow on 2 November 2020, which is also the day that we entered into a committed relationship and moved in together. I had just turned 22, he was a princely 23 years old.
In February of that year, I had pitched Jacob – who was then running a magazine – an interview with a band. For some reason, he’d said yes. When I was late to meet my deadline, he was so gracious that we started emailing jovially back and forth. He was funny, thoughtful and curious about me. The emails got longer, and then came the letters, the books, the Spotify playlists. He was in London and I was on the other side of the world, in Perth. I would often stay awake until the sun was coming up, just to be able to speak to him for a few extra minutes. Later, he would admit that he went through the extreme headache of getting his magazine stocked in a remote bookstore in Western Australia so that he would have an excuse to call.
Like me, Jacob’s early life had been chaotic. His parents, like mine, had had multiple marriages; he, too, had cycled through houses and step-parents and schools. We bonded over feeling very tired at a preternaturally early age, having frustrated creative ambitions, and our shared loneliness. We liked the same books, the same music. We had the same sense of humour. It was as if a part of me had been excised at birth, and I was meeting this other part of myself for the first time. This, in common parlance, is called projection.
It was a fairytale. When he offered up his apartment if I ever wanted to come over for a visit, I didn’t hesitate. Australia was locked down, so he wrote me a fake job offer letter so I could get approval to leave the country. This meant I would also have to apply for re-entry, but I wasn’t thinking about that. My parents were horrified. My friends were horrified. I had citizenship but no other safety net – if this failed, I would be alone in a foreign country with nowhere to live.
I went anyway.
In the arrival hall, Jacob missed me once because he was getting a coffee, and then a second time because he was standing in the wrong place. For a few minutes, I thought he’d ghosted me, until then I recognised a tall stranger with a beard and a baseball cap. My breath was punched out of me. Wordlessly, we crashed into each other.
Things were immediately difficult. Things were actually very hard. Our relationship was turbo-charged. We plunged into each other’s worst habits a week into knowing each other. He had lied about liking to cook or read poetry; I had lied about being athletic and knowing how to dress. He was a workaholic; I slept in late. How could he think that sweatpants were ‘uncouth’? I wanted to kill him.
We fought terribly. In person, he turned out to be totally different from me in every conceivable way: class, religion, culture. We were two pieces of different jigsaw puzzles trying to smush into each other. There was no coherent picture.
Three weeks into living together in his stupidly tiny studio flat, we got COVID. I threw up in the bed and he had back spasms so bad he couldn’t move. Banned from leaving the house, we had nothing to do but talk to each other like human beings. Despite this thing that we’d done, I found that Jacob and I were both very unromantic people. Surprisingly, we discovered commonality in early nights and orderly mornings; in a practical vision for the future. He was the kind of man, I began to understand, who was unwaveringly loyal. I was charmed by the way he fell asleep – which was constantly – anytime he was horizontal past 7:30pm. Sometimes, after a fight, I would watch the unconscious angles of his face and remember that it was his first time being alive too.
Winter ended and we moved house to Mile End. Lockdown lifted. I got a job. He shuttered the magazine and started a gallery. Soon we were playing house properly, folding each other’s laundry. Often, when I set dinner down on the table, I wondered if I was betraying myself. I suspected that this period of my life (I was now 23) should maybe be spent dancing and coming home to a sticky, fashionable flatshare. I should go to postgraduate school and collect vintage heels and have a lot of sex on twin mattresses. I should discover myself.
My other youth was stalking me, realised in the glimpses of girls I saw on the street, the Tube, Instagram. What bothered me about these moments wasn’t that I wanted this freedom and was denied it; it was that I didn’t want it at all. I was baffled by my own contentment. Our lives were spooling out in a collection of days that were boring, perfect; perfectly boring. We rotated between grocery stores, his mother’s place in Dublin, the coin laundry. I had always been an anxious person in relationships, agonising over details, waiting the appropriate amount of minutes to text back. Now I was calm, trustful. I worried about how happy I was: whether I was becoming dull. Whether I was becoming a girlfriend rather than a person.
Monogamy, some find, is this exact suffocation of the self via mutual contentment. In pursuit of safety, you fuse with the other person to create some horrible four-legged beast that eats autonomy, forcing you to forgo self-growth in favour of stagnant comfort. Paradoxically though, when I set aside the thrilling burden of dating casually, my time and mind were freed up to focus on myself. I read more, wrote more, thought more: I spent hours envisioning what I wanted from my life. Jacob’s love was a warm background hum; its presence was always felt, but never obstructive. Who was I, outside of the gaze of another? What could a woman be if she wasn’t haunted all the time by the phantom of her own desirability?
Jacob pushed me to be more independent; he demanded that we both continue to develop into adults that were capable of existing separately. Go out and live, we told each other, and then come home and tell me about it. We looked at our future like a house, identifying the foundations we would need to build first. It was important, we agreed, that this should always feel like a choice – that we knew we had other options, but were picking each other anyway. I quit my job and got a better one; I continued to write, partly because Jacob told me so often that he thought I was brilliant. I started to pay attention to my credit score, my taxes, my sense of fashion.
Was I being shaped by him? Well, yes. But I was also doing the shaping. Maybe it’s defeatist to recognise that much of my mind has been formed by experiences of womanhood, partnerhood, daughterhood. Love is fundamentally an act of change; of constant negotiation. You will always find yourself altered one way or another. When I think about the person I was before Jacob, I miss her. I wonder if she was happier, sadder, freer than I am now. But it’s the same soft curiosity you might have towards an old friend you outgrew a long time ago – somebody with whom you have no real desire to see again.
In the midst of one of my parent’s divorces, when I was 15 or so, I found a poem by Jack Gilbert that compares a marriage ending to Icarus falling out of the sky. It felt addressed to me. All I’d known at that point was termination: I’d cycled through a gamut of strange step-siblings and aspirational parental figures, and had lived in three countries and 20 different houses by the start of high school. I liked this poem so much that I recited it to my father constantly, which must have been very annoying.
I suppose I needed to think of divorce like that – a boy coming to the end of his triumph – because I knew it was going to happen to me and I wanted to be prepared.
You will fall in love and get married, I told myself, and then it will end. This end might occur before children or after it; perhaps they’ll cheat or you both will or you’ll smugly attempt non-monogamy to prolong the inevitable demise. But it will end nonetheless.
‘Anything worth doing is worth doing badly,’ wrote Gilbert in that poem. And later: ‘How can they say the marriage failed?’ It’s embarrassing to be 25 and pretend you know anything at all about life. I know less than I did at 15, and certainly less than I did at seven, which is the wisest age. I’m writing with the possibility that one day, Jacob and I might not be together anymore; we will have plunged towards the sea like Icarus. This will be an artefact of feeling, excavated from a period of history when I was arrogant enough to believe I could sum up the complexities of whatever exists between us.
My teenage self was right. Relationships end one way or another. Our wings all melt at some point. But this does nothing to blot out the worth of those experiences, only throws it into further relief. How beautiful it is, precisely because of its brevity. Perhaps, at some point, I will regret boarding that plane, giving my formative years to somebody else with the blind trust it would work out. Right now, though, I would like to stay here, flying for a while longer. I’ve grown very attached to the view.
