The Miscommunication That Started Everything
My now-husband Daniel was trying to find a club in Poblacion that a friend had recommended. He was new to Manila — had been here three weeks — and had the specific combination of confidence and total misdirection that recent arrivals to a new city carry. He walked into the bar where I was drinking with two friends, looked around, and clearly realized he was in the wrong place. He almost left. Instead, he said to me, because I was the closest person to the entrance: "Is this [club name]?" It was not. I told him so. He asked if I knew where it was. I did not, but I had a friend who might. We spent 15 minutes trying to locate the venue he was looking for, which turned out to be closed that night. Daniel, having nowhere to be, asked if he could join us for one drink before figuring out where to go next.
The One Drink
The one drink lasted until 1 AM. Daniel was a good conversationalist — direct without being aggressive, curious without being interrogating. He asked about Manila in the way that people ask who are genuinely trying to understand a city rather than to fill conversational space. I am from Manila and I have a specific protectiveness about it, the way people do about places they love that are frequently misunderstood. He was not misunderstanding it. My friends eventually went home. I stayed. We moved to a quieter bar nearby at some point around midnight. We talked about what it was like to arrive in a city where you know almost nobody and have to build everything from the beginning. He had done this in three cities before Manila. At 1 AM I gave him my number and went home.
Three Years Later
We went on five dates in the first three weeks. By the second month we were not dating so much as having a life in Manila together — going to the market on Saturdays, exploring neighborhoods that neither of us had been to, finding a bar in Poblacion that became our bar. Ordinary things that are extraordinary when they are happening for the first time with someone you want to be with. He proposed in the Philippines — on a boat off Coron in Palawan, which is nothing like a Manila nightclub, which is exactly right. We are married two years after that first drink. Manila made this possible. Not because it is a romantic city in any conventional sense. Because it is a city where the social temperature is warm enough that a stranger who walks into the wrong bar can ask a local where another bar is, and the conversation that follows can turn into a marriage.
