A few years ago, while living on Kaua’i, I had a monthslong crush on a postman. It had become a constant source of entertainment for me and my closest friends. He was a tall and handsome man with a gray beard, and there was something about him that intrigued me.
There was an indescribable air to him, a calm kindness that drew me to him. I learned that his first name was Uriah, and from some discreet reconnaissance, learned that he was single, but other than that, he was a blank slate. When I’d see him, I’d clam up like a nervous adolescent, all social graces viciously abandoning me and leaving me speechless.
One day, I finally summoned my nerve and scribbled a self-deprecating note with my phone number on a scrap of paper. I taped it inside my PO box with his name on the outside and drove home with a thousand butterflies filling my insides with both anxiety and exhilaration.
I thought I was getting rejected at first
Almost two weeks passed, and I had quietly accepted that he wasn’t interested. I had several slips for packages I had been assiduously ignoring, mildly humiliated by the rejection and reluctant to return to the post office. Eventually, though, I decided to act like an adult and go retrieve my mail.
To my relief, one of the other guys was working the counter, and I handed him my yellow package slip. Uriah suddenly emerged from the back office, made a beeline for the counter, and took the slip out of his colleague’s hand. Our eyes met, and when he brought my packages back, he shyly told me he’d call me. Apparently, he hadn’t known who I was until that day. He called that night.
He told a stranger on a ferry he was going to make me his wife
Our first date was going to Ke’e Beach to watch the sunset, and things moved quickly after. It was April, and I was leaving at the end of May to spend six weeks in Europe. I opened the exclusivity discussion when we were talking about my upcoming trip, and I told him I wasn’t going to see other people, but I understood if he did. He told me, “Julia, not only do I not want to see other people while you’re in Europe, I don’t think I want to see other people again at all.”
This was about a month after our first date, and while his words filled me with happiness, I made sure to explain that while I would love to spend my life with him, I didn’t want to get married, and I never had. He said he had never wanted to get married before either, but now he had changed his mind. As calm and kind as ever, he said he knew I would come around.
When I was leaving Hawai’i for Europe, he flew with me to New England to meet my family. After a few drinks at The Oar and Yellow Kittens on Block Island, on the ferry home, I heard him tell some guys he had just met that he was going to marry me. I just smiled and rolled my eyes.
I saw marriage as an excuse for complacency, but he changed everything
I’d never seen marriage as a union I wanted to enter into, because I saw couples dedicating less energy to the relationship once it was legal. I witnessed people stop trying as hard, taking one another for granted. When Uriah proposed in a tent in Maui six months after our first date, he had a wooden ring in his hand that he had carved himself. It was a few days before his 42nd birthday; we had taken the trip to Maui to celebrate. I had turned 41 a few months earlier, in July.
He explained (on one knee in a cold tent on a mountain) that the ring wouldn’t last, that it would break every few months, and each time he would carve me a new one. He told me that it was symbolic of his devotion to never becoming complacent, that he would never stop trying his best to make me happy. Of course, I said yes.
After we married, we moved 8,000 miles away
Three months later, in February 2024, we eloped on the same beach on Kaua’i where we had our first date. We had a second wedding that spring and rented a house in Sicily to have a celebration in front of our families. While we traveled around the Mediterranean on our honeymoon last summer, we fell in love with the island of Sardinia and decided to start a new life there.
We quit our jobs, I liquidated my stock portfolio, and we bought a 325-year-old house in Bosa to open as a bed and breakfast, a longtime dream I’d never quite had the courage to pursue. In 18 months, we went from being single and living in Hawai’i to married and living in Italy. I’m on my third wooden ring, and each one has been more beautiful than the last.
