by Angela Barbuti
“Is this Angela from eharmony?” Cosimo asked when I picked up the phone for our first call.
“Who else could it be?” I asked, already amused.
He had a beautiful voice; I could listen to it forever. Throughout the hour we spoke, he made me laugh but was straightforward, asking if I wanted to be married with children. He even set a date for the upcoming weekend. What we didn’t realize at the time was these phone conversations would have to replace in-person ones for the 115 days we’d be apart.
During the last week of January, I arrived at the trendy, yet simple Italian restaurant he chose for our first date, and immediately spotted him. He was tall and handsome, and—thankfully—resembled the photo that had initially attracted me: a black-and-white shot taken in front of a bookcase in the elementary school where he is a librarian (besides that picture, what won me over on his dating profile was his profession). Over dinner, he refilled my wine glass from the mini carafe on the table, and when he walked me back to my apartment, he made it a point to always stand closer to the traffic, which made me feel protected.
It was during our second date that I found out he still used a flip phone. When I asked why, he simply stated that he valued his privacy and didn’t feel the need for a smart alternative. Some of my friends warned that this was an obvious red flag.
“You know, I thought it was too at first, but everything else is so good. If that’s the worst thing, I’m OK with it,” I texted back in my girlfriends’ group chat a week and a half into my new relationship.
“So, no social media?” they continued.
“Nopers,” I replied. “And he can’t FaceTime.”
At thirty-nine, I had already dealt with what felt like every dating situation imaginable. This was a first, so I wasn’t sure what to make of it. He was seemingly perfect, so I was trying hard to find something wrong with him and started to think maybe the phone was it. By that point, we had already settled into a nightly banter that started on my walk home after my closing shift at the bookstore where I work, and ended when I was under the covers. Since I was already smitten, I couldn’t help but overlook the archaic technological component to our daily communication.
By Valentine’s Day, we were exclusively dating and I introduced him to my parents. The calls continued, and I started having to stop myself from saying “I love you” before our goodbyes, because we hadn’t said that to each other yet. The night before our one-month anniversary, we exchanged those words and after that, they became the punctuation mark to every phone call.
On March 11, the breaking news of the evening was that the NBA had shut down for the season and Tom Hanks was diagnosed with the Coronavirus. That night, I made the decision to leave my Manhattan apartment and stay with my parents on Long Island. Cosimo, who learned his school was shutting down for what was initially thought to be two weeks, was home in New Jersey with his mother. In a week, I’d be turning forty and the now-canceled happy hour I planned, where my new boyfriend would meet my extended family and friends, suddenly seemed so trivial. His “No matter what, I’m definitely coming over for your birthday,” turned into “I’m going to send your gift in the mail.” Since we were both living with our seventy-year-old parents, we couldn’t take any chances, so we resigned ourselves to the fact that we wouldn’t be seeing each other for a while.
During quarantine, I had to rely on that flip phone—of all things—to connect us. Since we couldn’t see each other physically, our words really mattered, and I kept falling in love over and over again with the things he said. He used terms like “ominous,” and stopped himself when he said “unorganized” and corrected it to “disorganized,” which always impressed me since English was not his first language. He also had the ability to churn out these adorable one-liners that made me laugh out loud. When I finally got my first byline in the New York Post, I brought up the show Good Girls Revolt, based on the book about the women of Newsweek in the 1960s not getting credit for their work on articles. “They can vote. They can wrestle,” he said, in support of female equality.
Dating with an outdated phone meant that if I sent him a photo, it would actually have to download on his screen, and even then it was all grainy and out of focus. If I wanted to share a picture of my baby nephew or me in my new bathing suit, I would have to email him. Not to mention, I couldn’t punctuate my texts with a pasta or heart emoji when I was feeling hungry or mushy, respectively. (The only emoji his phone would accept was the old-school smiley face formed using a colon and parenthesis). What I soon came to realize was all of that did not matter—his words and how he made me feel were the things that really counted. And his flip phone didn’t stop him from composing the sweetest messages, the most treasured being, “Not sure how much longer I can go without seeing you. You are my last thought at night and my first when I wake up.”
Although advanced technology has benefited virtually everyone else during this pandemic, our relationship became stronger without it. In a time of such change, there was something very comforting about speaking to each other in an old-fashioned way. Don’t get me wrong, I was so disappointed that I couldn’t lay eyes on the quarantine beard Cosimo was growing, and he wasn’t able to see me wearing the Tiffany’s necklace he sent for my birthday.
These conversations also proved that the once-daunting task of answering eharmony’s countless compatibility questions was, in actuality, a worthwhile endeavor. As we got to know each other, we kept discovering more things we had common, from our love of Alvin and the Chipmunks, to both being at the same Pearl Jam concert at Madison Square Garden just to appease our dates, to not believing in prenups. Also, we are both Godparents—he to his brother’s son and best friend’s daughter and I to my cousin’s son.
Besides our two-, three-, four-, and five-month anniversaries, we celebrated another page in our love story over the phone, when he proposed a few weeks into the lockdown. “Can I ask you a serious question? Will you marry me?” he said.
Since we had already discussed that being our long-term plan, I replied, “You know I want to marry you but it’s hard because we can’t see each other. Just for the record, I’ll say ‘yes,’ the next time you ask.” I hope that time will be in person.
Angela Barbuti is a Queens native who started her journalism career writing for her middle school newspaper. Her work has been featured in the New York Daily News, New York Post, and NY Press. As a celebrity interviewer, she’s spoken to icons such as Gloria Steinem and John Lewis and stars like Zac Efron and Jamie Dornan.