Sometimes you meet someone, and that first time you see them, you don’t know why, but you just know that person is going to become important in someway. If you’re of the literary persuasion, and all the world’s a stage—or perhaps a Fringe Festival—then some unbidden intuition whispers inside your head that the soul standing before you is about to become a major player upon the Stage of Your Life. (And, paradoxically, you simultaneously become one upon theirs. Entanglement, anyone?)

So you run into each other in the hallways of the university where you’re both doing the same PhD program; you become friends; you get coffee; you have conversations about what the word “quantum” really means and about the Victorian literary precursors to paranormal police procedurals and about the ontological status of ghosts; you end up at the same parties and by some mutually enacted gravity drift towards one another and spend most of the evening in each other’s orbit; you realize you’re constantly aware of where the other person is relative to you in the room; you realize you’ve been grinning like an idiot the whole time you’ve been talking; you realize that maybe perhaps this is more than friendship; you send pics of that sick omelette you cooked up; you send pho by way of Doordash when the other is sick; you starting going out to concerts together; you officially start going out; one of you adopts a cat your roommate found in a bush; you go on a five-week tour of Europe together and miraculously do not loathe one another by the time you get back; so, naturally, you move in together; you hash out your aesthetic differences and build a beautiful home together, featuring the bush-cat; you ask her to marry you on your birthday because hearing Yes is the only gift you’ll ever need again; you ask him to marry you at a real-life Hobbit House you secretly planned an overnight stay in for a birthday surprise.

You both say Yes.