Like Dex and Em in Netflix’s One Day, my husband and I were best friends for years before we got together

He was wearing a new shirt and shoes. I was wearing an old sweater and sneakers. He arrived early. I arrived late.

“I know you once said you didn’t like waiting alone in public places,” he said by way of explanation. I ordered a drink and started regaling him with stories about a man I was in love with, but who no longer loved me.

This would be a blind date set up by my sister, who worked on the same magazine as Will. Only it wasn’t exactly blind, because I had seen Will before. I was a student at the time and recently moved from Manchester to London.

He was a southern, drunken writer for a men’s magazine. I had passed by a party the magazine was throwing one evening and saw Will across the room. He had hair the color of scrambled eggs and was drunkenly shouting at no one in particular.

“What an idiot,” I remember thinking, and left.

I agreed to the date because I was heartbroken: the feeling that another man desired me seemed like at least a way to fix that.

Will listened patiently as I mourned the loss of a relationship I was never fully in. Then he finished his drink, paid the bill and said he had to go.

Months later I met him at an art exhibition. He came and said hello. We laughed about the date. I felt I could be myself when he was around. That was a new feeling for me.

I was 21 and not yet confident in my view of the world. I have borrowed the opinions, expressions and points of view of others. But not when I was with Will.

The point in our lives when we became friends is important in many ways. The year before, Will had stopped drinking. By his own admission, he was a “mess” before we met: drinking, drugs, alienating people when they were drunk.

He needed someone he could watch movies with, travel with, spend an evening with, but not in the pub. I got hurt and no longer wanted to be romantically close to another man, but to a male friend who I could hang out with.

Our friendship started small: trips to exhibitions, lunches, walks around London. He was already an award-winning writer, known for his bold, gonzo journalism. I really wanted to be a writer, but instead found myself working at the members club, Soho House. Will lent me good books to read and talked about writing with a passion I had never seen before.

Unlike Dexter and Emma, ​​the characters in David Nicholls’ novel One Day, we did not come from different class backgrounds, although we did come from different parts of the country: he from Tunbridge Wells, me Salford.

But he was unlike any other man I had ever met. He listened to classic film scores while walking the streets of London at night because he enjoyed it. Everyone I knew at that point in my life was pretending to be someone else. But not Will.

A few months into our friendship, a friend left me at the last minute when we were going to Stockholm together for a three-night mini vacation. So I asked Wil. “Okay,” was his response. And off we went.

All the things I wanted to do – traveling, walking or cycling around the city until the early hours, I could do because Will was with me.

I also gave him more confidence to take on the world.

Without alcohol, he told me, he felt awkward in social situations: tongue-tied and out of character. But not when I was with him.

When we landed back at Luton airport we stayed and had jacket potatoes in a horrible airport cafe so we could be in each other’s company for a few more hours.

A few years later, during a short holiday together to Paris, I persuaded him to come shopping with me. I tried coat after coat until I finally found a beautiful buttercup yellow mac. I asked Will to take a picture of it.

He did so and then abruptly left the store. Years later he admitted that he was sad at the thought of me wearing that jacket with another man.

I had my own moments too. Like the night we went to a concert and he started growing a little beard. I remember being surprised at how handsome he was – something I had never noticed before.

“I like you so much,” I remember saying to him on the train home. He looked shocked, so I laughed it off. But all I wanted was to kiss him.

By the time I was 25, we had known each other for almost five years. I was finally a writer for a magazine; he had just gotten his first book deal.

Then the older man I had been in love with all those years ago unexpectedly came back into my life. This man, whom I had placed on a pedestal for years, seemed thin compared to Will: less thoughtful, less generous, certainly less sensitive, and not half as funny, smart, or even handsome.

I spent much of my early twenties afraid that I would spend the rest of my life in a hopeless, unrequited love for this man. Now, almost overnight, it was over.

Will had saved me. But Will and I didn’t get together right away after that. That would be too neat a conclusion. Six months later, in the summer of 2003, it happened.

Despite dating men regularly during our friendship, Will had never actually dated. He’d gone to Glastonbury without me and then called me the first night there, with the music blaring in the background.

“It’s not the same without you,” he shouted over the noise. “There are all these funny things and no one finds them funny in the way I know you would.”

I remember the joy I felt when I was missed; when necessary. Then there was a pause. ‘But I met someone. . .’

When I heard that, my body became a snowball of emotions: panic, sadness, fear. The last four and a half years of our time together suddenly flashed before my eyes. If Will met someone, chances were he would fall in love, and then I would lose him completely. I knew I couldn’t let that happen.

“Why don’t you just come back to London?” I said.

He immediately left the festival and took the first train. I found myself doing my hair, choosing the right clothes, putting on lipstick.

He arrived at my apartment just before midnight. He came through the door and we kissed like lovers who hadn’t seen each other in years. Behind that kiss was every mini-break we’d ever taken, every walk around London, every laugh we’d ever had.

It was a relationship that had become much more than friendship. Friendship with love? Maybe. Or love dressed up as friendship as we found our feet in the world.

Today I am 45; Will is almost fifty. He has known me for more than half my life. I know him better than anyone in his life.

I remember reading One Day in 2009. Instead of a grand love story, I saw it as a small love story – a story in which the relationship between Dexter and Emma grows through the small, everyday acts of friendship.

I was grateful that a book had finally recognized the role that good friendship can play in a love story, instead of silly notions of “instant connections made in a crowded room” that had populated the culture when I was growing up—and had my ideas about it wrong informed. relationships.

I recently read a piece by the author of the book that highlights this. “(One Day) is an epic love story,” he writes. ‘But looking at it again now, it seems to me primarily a book about friendship, about our ability to change each other’s lives for the better through conversations and caring.’

I hope every lost 21-year-old woman who watches this Netflix series will realize that too.

Farrah Storr writes the newsletter Things Worth Knowing.

Visit Farrah Storr’s Substack at farrah.substack.com.