Seventeen Years In

Two people turning time into a shared history

Alex Colville, To Prince Edward Island, 1965

Seventeen years ago today, I climbed into a car not knowing I would never get off that ride. Emi pulled over in his white Mazda, I got in, put out my hand and said “I’m Sabina, nice to meet you,” and off we drove into a future neither of us could have predicted. Did I know, in that instant, that we’d still be together all these years later, that we’d build the life we have now? I didn’t have a clue. I just knew I had met someone who shared my curiosity, my sense of wonder, my hunger for more than what we’d been handed. We didn’t have much in common—different upbringings, different interests—but I felt like I’d met my match.

A few months into our relationship, that intuition materialized. We were driving around in the white Mazda when Emi said he had something important to tell me but didn’t know how. He had decided to move to London because he didn’t think he could build the company he wanted in Romania. I said, “No fucking way—I’m moving to London. I got into university and didn’t know how to tell you.” I don’t believe in fate, but I believe in luck, and meeting so young was the luckiest hand we’d been dealt.

Since then, we’ve lived in four cities, across three countries and two continents. Emi has built multiple companies. We’ve been through moves, career pivots, losses that tested everything. At some point along the way, the naive intuition became earned knowledge. When people ask what makes it work, I don’t have a formula. But love isn’t what sustains a relationship—love is the result of what sustains it. Compatibility, the willingness to show up when things get ugly, and enough respect that you still like each other on the other side.

Compatibility, the way I see it, has nothing to do with passion or even shared interests—although it’s easier to build shared interests when you’re growing up together, molding and being molded by one another. What matters is that we’re equals in the ways that actually count. Not identical—our strengths are completely different, our intelligence is of a different type—but intellectually, emotionally, we speak the same language. We also matched in our mess, which turned out to be just as important. Neither of us came with addiction or rigid belief systems or the kind of baggage that requires a savior. Everyone is fucked up. The trick is landing in roughly the same weight class.

Equals, but not the same. It took me years to understand the difference. I admire Emi—I’m always in awe of what he’s capable of—but I’ve never worshiped him, never thought “How lucky I am that he chose me.” More like: “How lucky we are to have found each other.” When I was younger and less self-assured, I would look at his success, his confidence, and think that becoming more like him was the answer to feeling better about myself. This wasn’t about competition—which I find one of the most destructive forces in a relationship. It was about looking at someone I cared for and trusted and thinking that by emulating his path I would find my own. As I grew more into myself and into our relationship, I paradoxically returned to who I was when we first met.

Growing into yourself doesn’t just happen by getting older. It happens in the hardest moments, when everything you’ve built feels like it might disappear. A few years ago, we went through the hardest period we’ve had together—not because of our relationship, but because we faced a loss that threatened everything we’d built. The kind of crisis where you either turn on each other or toward each other. I remember seeing Emi at his lowest, and my first thought wasn’t panic—it was clarity. This is who we are when things fall apart. Some people become monsters under pressure. Some relationships crack because pain gets confused with blame, and what you once loved about someone becomes unbearable. We turned toward each other. I kept admiring him—respected him more, even, for not collapsing. And I learned something about myself too: I could hold things together when everything felt like it was breaking.

Crises are useful tests for relationships, but they don’t sustain them. What sustains them are the small things, repeated over years, that allow you to arrive at a point where it feels like it all “just works.” We don’t try to change each other. Emi is not going to be more patient. I’m not going to stop being judgmental or cynical. We know this about each other and we’ve stopped pretending otherwise. Trying to re-engineer a partner is just condescension in romantic packaging. It says you’re not quite enough, but I can fix that.

That doesn’t mean we don’t challenge each other—or never push back. Respect means seeing someone clearly, flaws included, and choosing them anyway. We also don’t keep score. I’ve seen it in other couples, that subtle impulse to tally who did what, who owes whom. I did X so you owe Y isn’t love—it’s accounting. It makes generosity feel like debt. When you’re with the right person, someone who isn’t interested in winning at your expense, generosity doesn’t feel like giving something up. You notice what you’re good at, take it on without fanfare, and trust the other person to do the same.

We live in a world where movies like Materialists get made—where the moral is choose chaos as long as it’s passionate, pick the broke artist over stability, ignore compatibility because love will figure it out. I don’t buy it. Passion is easy. But kindness—the unglamorous sort that shows up when you let something go instead of being right—is far harder. When you make the reservation every Friday for seventeen years. When you see someone at their worst and don’t resent them for it. Kindness gets sacrificed at the altar of being “heard” or “validated,” as if those things build anything that lasts.

Here’s the part people don’t usually say: even with all of this—the partnership, the respect, the family we’ve built together—I still feel empty sometimes. Frustrated that I haven’t achieved what I wanted in other areas of my life. And that’s not a reflection on the relationship. It’s not that it isn’t “enough.” There’s no such thing as enough when you’re a living human, needy, egotistical, flawed. Our relationship is the greatest accomplishment of my life. It’s the main source of joy and meaning for me, and yet, I can still feel lost about my own path.

And sometimes—not often, but sometimes—I feel completely alone. Not because of anything Emi does or doesn’t do. Just alone in the fundamental way we’re all alone. No matter how well someone knows you, how deeply they love you, there’s still this part of you that stands apart. An island of your own thoughts, your own pain, your own way of seeing the world that can’t be fully shared. This scares me in the same way death does—we all die alone. It’s singular, solitary. Even the best relationship can’t erase that essential separateness. That’s the condition, not the flaw.

Seventeen years in, here’s what I know: love doesn’t solve ambition, flatten pain or erase existential loneliness. But it’s the thing that makes life worth living. The daily building of something that didn’t exist before. Two people turning time into a shared history, harvesting luck, paying attention. The accumulated weight of years spent choosing each other, again and again.