Continued from A Transatlantic Love Story, Part VII.

The plan worked out well. In fact, it changed all plans that came before it. He studied in New York. I finished school in Ohio, then we both moved back to London. I found a loop hole in a student visa that allowed me to work in England for the six months after my graduation, and that’s what I did, finding out quickly that no one wanted to hire a recent American grad for just six months.

This is where the confusion started. Maybe we joked that we’d get married when my visa ran out or maybe we didn’t. He knew that I started adding it to my cover letters, that my visa was a temporary measure until my fiancé and I were married. I knew we weren’t planning a wedding, but I thought we were serious about getting married. I thought that he knew he’d need to propose if we were going to stay together. I had a nice little job at an independent book publishing company in London when he told me he had no intentions of marrying me.

“Ask your company to pay for your visa,” he said. I cried.

“They’d have to prove that I have skills that no one else in England has.” I tried to hold it together. I tried to reason with him. “I’ve only been working for six months. It’s impossible.”

“It doesn’t hurt to ask,” he said. I thought, It doesn’t hurt to propose to the love of your life either, but I didn’t say it.

The president of my company called me into his office concerning my soon to expire visa, a meeting where I broke down in tears when having to relate the news of my non-pending nuptials. They couldn’t extend my visa. “You’ve only been working six months,” he said with such kindness that made my soul distort with humilation at having asked. ”This is the problem with love, huh?” I cried even harder.

I was going to lose my job and if I let the visa lapse then I could be deported, meaning I would not be able to enter the country again for ten years. I saw proposals waiting around every corner—every dinner out, every park bench, every moonlight walk—but it never happened. Instead, we planned an impromptu trip to an island off the coast of Naples for a long weekend, so I could come back into the country with a three-month tourist visa. Working on that visa would still be grounds for deportation, and I had not quit my job.

The trip to Ischia was as dark as the Positano trip was bright. Winter in a seaside town, the ultimate reflection of our relationship. I remember sitting at a café overlooking the Mediterranean and listening to him tell me why he couldn’t marry me. I’m not sure what it was he said exactly because, in my usual way, all I heard was the rumbling of gray clouds over our otherwise perfect love.

The next few weeks were torture. I continued to work for my company. I continued to wait for him to get on the white horse and pull out that “I love you” visa. Every knock on the door almost drove me into cardiac arrest. I stopped opening my mail. I shut down until a month later when everything came storming out late one night in our kitchen.

“What is it that you want?” he asked. “Just say what you want.”

“I want to get married. I want you to love me. I want you to say that you’ll marry me and make all of the bad stuff go away.” The tap dripped incessantly. I sat on the counter while he leaned against the wall.

“I do love you. I do want to marry you,” he said, “I just don’t want your visa to be the thing pushing us into it.” Outside someone shut a car door and began to jingle their keys.

“You want to marry me?” I asked. He threw his hands in the air as if it were obvious. Had he being saying this all along?

“Yes!” he shouted. I shifted on the countertop. He placed his hands on either sides of my knees, looking up at me with those big beautiful green eyes, that wonderfully soft English accent. “Of course I love you and want to marry you.” Then why hadn’t he proposed? I still don’t fully understand, but I do know that my husband resists anything that is dictated by ”The Man” and it seems that he was not going to let “The Man” dictate when he proposed and when he didn’t. Sigh.

“Can we get a ring?” I asked.

“Yeah, we can go right now if that will make you happy.” His eyes gleamed bluer green under the flickering flourescent light, and suddenly his frustration seemed quite sweet. He wanted to propose for love and felt stifled by having to do it for convenience.

“It would,” I said.

The next morning we drove to the local mall and picked out a cubic zirconium beauty for thirty pounds (about $50 at the time). With this ring, he then extended my visa another six months—an engagement visa. I still wasn’t legally aloud to work but we were getting married and nothing else mattered, including the threat of being deported.