When I first saw Krista, I swiped left.
It wasn’t because she wasn’t cute. She very much was. She was sexy. She had great style. She seemed very, very fun. But, I had a rule about Tinder profiles without descriptions after too many “Your a transgender?” messages. I was in search of a well-explained history of bisexuality, a politic far to the left of my own, and ideally, at least one piece of David Bowie paraphernalia. Krista had none of these.
And yet, last week, we went to the Westwood location of 24HourMarriageLA.com and promised our lives to each other. For the third time in my life, I have a wife. For the first time in my life, I am one. I have never been loved the way Krista loves me, and I’ve never loved anyone the way I love her. I am pessimistic about the future of our world but optimistic about the future of my marriage and the person whose hand I will hold as we walk together into whatever happens next.
Tinder+ was the best money I’ve ever spent. As soon as I swiped left on Krista, I was seized with remorse. “Come on, Jude!” I thought, “She’s cute and fun, and it’s not like you have to marry her!” I un-did my rejection and swiped right. I probably messaged something like, “Hey, Krista, how’s your heart in this weird time?” (It was the pandemic, but this question now feels evergreen). And then, I dove into the pile of other strangers: cute and not cute, kind and unkind, the sorts who might love a trans woman and the ones who would definitely not.
And somewhere in my swiping, Krista matched with me.
We messaged for a while. She had moved from Oakland to LA to pursue standup comedy right before the pandemic and watched her audiences shrink as more and more people stayed home, first out of caution, later from quarantine. She was funny and wry. She wasn’t afraid to make fun of me. There were no kid gloves, no tiptoeing around what she might or might not be allowed to say about trans people.
I asked Krista what she’d been working on instead of stand-up comedy, and she sent me a picture of a chair, which she’d thrifted, re-painted, and covered with hand-stitched puff balls. My crush became immediately terminal. I swooned. I got angry at myself for swooning. Would it kill me to have a few casual hookups?
We scheduled our first date the day before I would drive cross country to deliver the family dog to the East Coast and bring a U-Haul full of stuff to my ex and our kids. It was a chaotic time. It was during a large-scale exodus from LA, and U-Hauls were hard to come by - I had to go almost to Joshua Tree to find a rental facility with trailers available.
The studio I worked for at the time had bet big on Quibi, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s expensive bet on high-quality content for mobile devices. When Quibi cratered, the studio laid off the majority of the creative team, one of them just after she’d signed the lease on a new apartment. As I’d found myself living by myself in a multi-bedroom suburban house, I offered her a place to stay and store her stuff until she figured out her next steps.
My first date with Krista was supposed to be a dog walk in Griffith Park. I had seen her chair and gotten excited about her. And now, I was a forty-something baby trans woman with a twenty-something-year-old roommate getting ready for a date. I felt self-conscious about the date, my limited ability with makeup, and my general newness to being a woman who wanted to be wanted.
When I left the house, my temporary roommate and her friend were lounging by the pool. They were sweet to me, complimenting my outfit, telling me that they weren’t going to wait up for me, that they’d see me tomorrow morning. Touch-starved and lonely, I let this pep talk get my hopes up. I got in my car with a dumb smile on my face and put on the King Princess album I’d discovered when I first started dating. I started driving east.
Fifteen minutes into the drive, I got a text from Krista. She said she had a tummy ache. She said she wanted to postpone our date. I lied and said that I hadn’t left the house yet. I tried to tell myself that I didn’t feel dumb for getting excited about someone, that I didn’t think my love life as a trans woman would be a long series of last-minute cancellations. I thought about what I could do to kill time so I wouldn’t have to go immediately back home to the two young women cheering on my date. All I could come up with was a dog walk without a date, and that felt a little too pathetic. I went home.
It didn’t feel pathetic. My friend and her friend immediately jumped to my defense in a chorus of boozy, post-layoff “Fuck her! She doesn’t know what she’s missing! You’re too good for her!” It felt like something I’d missed out on. When men had consoled me about heartache, it had always been uncomfortably misogynistic, a lot of calling variations of “bitch” variations of “crazy.” But this felt like being the house mother of a cool sorority.
But also, one of the women had a chemist for a father. And this chemist had tested a batch of ecstasy she’d taken home and reported that it was clean and pure. Would I like some?
I’d never tried ecstasy, but the night before a cross-country road trip felt like the perfect opportunity. We lit a bonfire. I think there might have been pizza? We took the ecstasy. We stayed up late, talking about the heavy things everyone had been going through. And at some point, late in the night, our hearts cracked open by MDMA, we acknowledged that just like us, Krista must be going through heavy things and was worthy of forgiveness.
Early the next morning, I put the family dog into my ex-wife’s car and set out on the road across America. On my breaks to fill the tank, stretch my legs, and walk the dog, I texted Krista and a cute nonbinary person I’d matched with. My ego wanted there to be more of a spark with the nonbinary person, but the texts with Krista just flowed. She sent me a very dark, very scary podcast to listen to on the road. Somehow, the heaviness made me like her more. I listened to a few episodes as I made my way through the desert and then switched to Dolly Parton’s America because I needed a little hope.
I made it to the East Coast. We had a FaceTime date from an Airbnb in a third-story apartment in a bad neighborhood with a front door that didn’t lock. It was short. I didn’t think she liked me. At some point, I said I’d need to find a new dog. There had been a rash of assaults on trans women in LA, and I wanted “a crazy-looking dog that was secretly a marshmallow.” She signed off abruptly. Krista said, “We should meet in person so I can see what you smell like.” And then she was gone.
Laying in bed, listening to occasional sirens and gunshots, I stalked Krista’s Instagram and the nonbinary person’s Instagram. I wished she were more excited about me. I wished I were more excited about them.
The next day, I got a text:
Krista had found the perfect dog. I told her I was going to adopt Zeby, and she laughed. Dogs were impossible to come by in the pandemic. I campaigned hard for my scary-looking marshmallow. And in between letters of recommendation and shameless campaigning for Zeby, Krista and I scheduled our real first date.
She was gorgeous, funny, sharp and confident. She remembers what I wore. I don’t remember what she wore. I remember her eyes, her smile, and her voice. She told me stories of living in squats and jumping on trains and teaching circus in Palestine. I remember thinking: what an extraordinary person, I would like her to have some gentleness. Not that she needed it, certainly not from a rando from Tinder. She was braver and tougher than me by leaps and bounds. But I wanted gentleness for her despite all that. I still do.
The waiter asked us if we wanted to take the chips and guacamole that we didn’t eat to go. I said yes and left with a small stack of boxes. I balanced the boxes between me and Krista, thwarting the possibility of a kiss. I left, feeling awkward and smitten.
We texted:
The day I got Zeby, I took her on a walk with the cute nonbinary person. At the end of the date, when they asked what might happen next, I apologized and said that I was excited about someone else and didn’t think I could be casual. They were kind about it.
Krista and I had our second real date and our first kiss. I spent nights at her place. She spent nights at mine. Quarantine time was dense, and in the weeks that felt like months and the months that felt like years, we got to know each other very well, very quickly.
We had so much fun. We laughed a lot. We cried a lot. I had not fully recovered from the shock of losing my kids to a cross-country move. Just looking at their class pictures could send me into deep, mournful sobs. Between mourning the disappearance of stand-up comedy and the grind of chronic illness, Krista brought her own heaviness to our early days.
When I realized I loved her, I was terrified. I’d already lost so much to transition but had also learned that I couldn’t let the fear of loss stop me from seeing it through. I told her, “I know for sure that I won’t have this face in six months. I think it’s very likely that I’ll have a different body with different genitals. So, if this is what you signed up for, I totally understand if you don’t want a different version of me. But, at this point, it’s my journey.”
My warning didn’t scare Krista away. I joked, “You’re getting in on the ground floor. Once this place is fixed up, it’s going to be beautiful.” She stood by me as those renovations were made, nursing me back to health after four surgeries.
Along the way, we did the work of love: integrating my kids into our relationship (easy for my younger, harder for my older son, almost certainly because of the pressure I put on him), untangling our incompatible habits, finding common ground for the best versions of ourselves, and healing from past wounds. We cried sometimes. We laughed constantly. It was good. The work didn’t feel like work. It felt like spending time with an old friend, a lover from previous lifetimes, a comfortable reunion as much as anything new.
In September, as we celebrated four years of dating, we started talking about getting married. Maybe we’d have a small wedding in Ojai, a destination wedding in Italy, or something in our backyard? There was no rush. Krista wanted to go on a silent meditation retreat to get perspective on the shifts in her life from stand-up comic to fashion reseller and stepmom.
In November, on the night of the election, I stayed up watching the man who spent over $200 million on anti-trans ads win state after state that I thought would be carried by Kamala’s charm and savvy. “Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Oh fuck.”
A raft of “what ifs” changed our timeline. What if the new administration federalizes the anti-trans laws of Texas, Tennessee, or Florida? What if Clarence Thomas’s ominous earmark of Obergefell comes for gay marriage? What if a historically hostile year for trans people in 2024 becomes the unlivable vision of Project 2025? What if we need to leave?
We decided to get married as quickly as possible and started scouring court websites online for available appointments. The closest we came to a formal proposal was this text from Krista, which I received when I was on the East Coast, visiting my kids for Thanksgiving.
We couldn’t find a court. We changed the venue to a strip mall. The wedding was supposed to be on a Tuesday, the day after I returned from Thanksgiving, but Krista had a bad cold. We pushed it to Friday and didn’t lose our deposit. I had a stack of boxes waiting for me when I came home, and in those boxes were a dress and shoes that I liked.
We decided to incorporate the wedding into our third short film together, so two cinematographer friends joined us as we got ready for the very casual “big day.” We were met by a small group of friends who could sneak away from work for a Friday morning wedding. Before the wedding, Krista and I had talked about having a “real” ceremony later: fancier, better attended, more expensive. On our wedding day, that felt entirely unnecessary.
Behind a curtain in the strip mall chapel, we filled out our forms, stamped our thumbprints, and signed our license. We stepped out in front of a small group of dear friends and felt bathed in love. Krista and I promised ourselves to each other in our own words, in our own way, in our own time, and it was perfect. And life feels, like it hasn’t in a very long time, like an adventure.
I am binge-ing your writing and this was so sweet and lovely! Congratulations. I laughed, I swooned.
Congratulations you two! Sorry this is late.