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34 JULY 2018 VOGUE.COM``````speechwriter and book collaborator—I still wasn’t quitebuying it. There were times when I wished YJ would changeher mind, but I respected her choice.One evening in late September 2017, we were strollingdown a cobblestone street in Rome’s bohemian Traste-vere neighborhood. We had justshared a branzino at one of herfavorite restaurants, a cozy lit-tle trattoria near Piazza di SanCalisto, and were looking forsomewhere to go dancing.A few days earlier, on a sun-drenched Mediterranean after-noon in Amalfi, we had watchedtwo of our closest friends get mar-ried. It was gorgeous, and theyseemed so happy, but I didn’t eventry to imagine us doing somethingsimilar. We were not going to havea storybook wedding, and thatwas just fine. I loved YJ not inspite of her unconventionality butbecause of it. She was passionate,iconoclastic, and insatiably ad-venturous, and even if she rejectedthe institution of marriage, I feltlucky that she wanted to spendher life with me.Taking my hand, she led medown a narrow side street. Then this woman who had sur-prised me so many times before did something that I wouldnever have expected.##### At first we were rivals. We met in the springof 2005 in Virginia, two recent college gradsgoing door-to-door trying to elect TimKaine governor. Each day we competed tosee who could talk to more voters. With herlong legs and boundless energy, YJ alwayswon. We were living with a dozen other campaign workers ina two-bedroom condo in Virginia Beach. It was so crowdedthat one of our colleagues slept under the dining-room table.YJ and I were drawn together, but also repelled. She thoughtit was pretentious that I sometimes cooked what seemedat the time like gourmet meals in our tiny shared kitchen,making pesto from scratch and opening a bottle of decentred wine. I thought the same of the rabbi’s daughter witha Barnard College degree proclaiming her love for countrymusic and pickup trucks.After the campaign was over, we went our separate ways.I moved to Washington, D.C., to work in Hillary’s Senateoffice. YJ eventually went back to New York and started lawschool at Columbia. We kept in touch, our old rivalry settlinginto a warm but not especially close friendship.A few years later, in 2009, I was in New York visiting mygrandmother, who was in the hospital with a broken hip. Thatnight, emotionally drained, I met YJ for a drink. I told herhow it had felt to hear my grandmother, once such a force of``````nature, a vital writer and composer, tell me that she wantedto die. As I talked, I wondered: Why was I pouring my heartout to this woman I’d barely seen over the past three years?Why did I feel like such an open book around her?We started dating that summer in D.C. Other than anevening at a riveting produc-tion of King Lear set in a garishpost-Soviet kleptocracy (yearslater we still think of that nightas one of our best dates), it didnot go well. I had convincedmyself that we needed to figureout if this could be a serious ro-mantic relationship by the end ofthe summer, when she would goback to law school in New York. Iwanted us to see each other all thetime and act like a couple. YJ feltthe same emotional connection Idid, but she wasn’t ready to makeany kind of commitment. Andalthough I didn’t know it at thetime, she kept seeing other peo-ple. Increasingly, she avoided mycalls and the pressure that camewith them. When her summerlaw-firm job neared its end, shedeclared that instead of spendingAugust with me, she was movingto Afghanistan to work for a nonprofit. On YJ’s last nightin town, when I showed up unannounced at her door onCapitol Hill to say goodbye, she didn’t answer. As I sat onthe stoop, humiliated, it started to rain.Every few months for the next year, compelled by some-thing we couldn’t name, one of us would reach out and we’dstart speaking again. But when we saw each other, it alwaysended in spectacular blowups. We argued about why oursummer romance hadn’t succeeded, whether her taking ajob at a big corporate law firm constituted selling out, andthe way I projected my idealized vision onto her instead ofengaging with the real woman she was. For two people whohad barely dated, it was surprisingly emotional.When YJ wrote from New York to say she was coming toD.C. for Jon Stewart’s rally in the fall of 2010, I lied and said Iwasn’t free. YJ is nothing if not persistent. She tried again thefollowing week, and I reluctantly agreed to meet. Somehowthis time was different. She had graduated from law school,spent a few months working on a farm in Tuscany, meditat-ing in an ashram in Thailand, and surfing in Bali, and alongthe way had decided she was ready for a real relationship. Ididn’t have to be told twice. We spent two years commutingbetween our respective cities, and then she got a job at theState Department and moved in with me.We eventually found a third-floor walk-up one-bedroomin the Adams Morgan neighborhood, with a bay windowand an open kitchen. I was helping Hillary write her StateDepartment memoir and get ready to run for president,and YJ was organizing peace talks in SyriaUp Front Marry Me?UP FRONT>37``````EYES FOR YOUAFTER THEIR MALIBU CEREMONY, YJ (A FORMERDIPLOMAT) AND DAN (HILLARY CLINTON’SFORMER SPEECHWRITER) CELEBRATED WITH FRIENDSIN WASHINGTON, D.C., IN MARCH 2018.``````EVA RUSSO/COURTESY OF DAN SCHWERIN