Elise remains a self-respecting and grounded human—she likes her life, and her privacy. She still doesn’t follow me on Instagram and her account is private, with just a small following of friends and loved ones who she lets in. Fame, or even fame by association, was never aspirational for her; she dedicated the first half of her 20s to educating, interior design projects, and writing. On the other hand, I had never been more public-facing than in our first year together: from fashion weeks to beauty campaigns to the Met Gala. Those first few months illustrated our lifestyle differences and became a testing ground for how we would relate to the outside world. When I nonchalantly mentioned I was engaged on a podcast in the summer of 2022, it made an embarrassing amount of headlines, and so we decided as a couple to keep things private until we chose to invite others in.
We decided that, at some point down the line, we would just elope. Elise never aspired to be a bride in the traditional sense—she didn’t have fantasies of walking down the aisle or large swaths of people staring at her and her future partner as they performed the spectacle and theatrics of marriage. Simply put, she just didn’t feel the need for a big event, and since I had already had that experience at my first wedding with 300-plus guests, I happily obliged. Our love had formed and grown in a contained bubble, so why couldn’t our marriage be on the same terms? We even picked up wedding dresses one day while shopping at Dover Street Market without a specific date in mind, just to have in case we felt inspired. She fell in love with a Cecile Bahnsen set, and I, a Simone Rocha number. Off the rack, no tailoring, just right. We giggled in the fifth-floor dressing room like teenagers who were doing something naughty. Except we were adults, we could do what we wanted! (Plus, I had worked at Dover Street when I was in college, so it felt like a sweet omen to find our dresses there.)
