Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean
Day 1,696
I’m on a plane, going home. It feels so surreal, I keep looking around me as if someone will stop me and say, “I’m so sorry, Ms. Cooper, you can’t actually go back to the States. Don’t be silly.” But that doesn’t happen and Simon keeps cheerfully eating chips in the seat next to me, his wedding ring making a satisfying clink when he picks up his drink.
A big part of me always assumed I’d end up returning to the States in ignominy. As of tomorrow, I’m officially deputy director of the CDC, a job I didn’t even dare to covet. Practically everyone I worked with at the CDC is dead. So many men, gone, and if I’m really honest, often forgotten, at least by me. I knew my interview had either gone perfectly or I’d bombed because it only lasted twenty minutes.
“You’ve smashed it!” George said, when I walked into his office, a bit shell-shocked, at 3:21 p.m., having started the interview at 3 p.m. “If they thought you were terrible they’d have dragged it out a bit, so you couldn’t complain if you didn’t get the job.” As ever, he was right.
Simon wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing when I told George I was applying for the job. “You don’t understand,” I told him. We’re not like colleagues, we’re like soldiers. We’ve been through a lifetime together in a few years. He walked me down the aisle. He’s become like a father to me. I knew he would support me for the CDC job; a dream come true. He helped me with interview prep every afternoon for two weeks.
And now, I’m on a plane, which feels unbelievably exotic, going back to my old life with a new husband, a new job, a new everything. I can remember what Elizabeth Cooper was like a few years ago but it feels so distant, it’s like a childhood memory. I was lonely, far from friends and family. I’ve always been good at making acquaintances but struggled to convert them into deep friendships. It kind of makes sense my best friend is now a sixty-five-year-old male professor.
I stretch my arms and look up at the rest of our section of the plane. It’s hard not to play spot the difference with the last time I was on a plane. Last time it was mainly men on my overnight flight to London, dressed in suits with pseudoscience books, crime novels and newspapers tucked under their arms. Now, it’s a sea of women interspersed with the occasional man sticking out. Obvious and intriguing just by being male. The woman to the right of Simon is holding a book I’ve heard about but don’t feel I really have the right to read. Are You Fucking Kidding Me?, a children’s book for adults. It’s written by a widow and meant to help people feel comforted by . . . well, I’m not sure. That they’re not alone, I suppose, having either lost their partner or feeling despair at this scary new world. I feel a twang of relief that Simon’s by my side. Lovely, lovely Simon. My husband. I skim a kiss across his cheek and he smiles in response.
I turn to the TV and flick through the channels. Since TV and films started being made again, I’ve noticed there are only two types of shows: classic family sitcoms and fantasy dramas. Nostalgia or imagination. Take your pick. I thought I was going nuts, or my Netflix was playing tricks on me, and then I saw an interview with the head of content strategy at Netflix and she said that’s all people want right now. People want to dive into the past when the biggest concern was whether your crush would invite you to prom, or imagine an alternative reality. True crime is out, she said. I can believe it. I used to love true crime podcasts; now they’re too heavy. I don’t want to hear about miscarriages of justice. Life has been a miscarriage of justice recently.
Oh, I know what I’m going to watch. The Luke Thackeray documentary. Ordinary guy from England is an out-of-work actor in the States. Goes home to say good-bye to his dad and his three brothers and await his death. Turns out, he’s immune and gets a call from his agent when the film and TV industries pick up. There’s a shortage of actors in Hollywood for the first time in history. Eighteen months later, he’s one of the biggest movie stars in the world. He’s spoken a bit in interviews about the conflict he feels: his father and three brothers died, yet the Plague killed almost all of his competition and now he’s one of the world’s most successful actors.
“You okay?” Simon asks.
“I’m good, just going to watch a documentary.” Simon makes an impressed face. I won’t mention it’s a documentary about a cute actor. “Everything’s going to be okay, okay?” Simon rubs my hand gently as he says this and I feel the bit of tension in my shoulders about my first day tomorrow evaporate.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” I repeat back and, do you know what? I believe it.
ARTICLE IN THE WASHINGTON POST ON JANUARY 12, 2031
“Finding love in a new world”
by Maria Ferreira
The world has changed immeasurably. That much we all know. I have the newest iPhone and it’s as small as the iPhones of a decade ago because Apple realized that women have smaller hands than men (who knew?) and so the tablet-size monstrosities they expected everyone to buy didn’t fit in women’s pockets or hands. I can now type comfortably with one hand for the first time in years. Women are now 57 percent less likely to die of heart attacks because treatment protocols have changed to recognize the different symptoms men and women experience. The first drug ever to treat endometriosis has been discovered; it is expected to create billions in profit over the next decade. Female police officers, firefighters and members of the armed forces are now less likely to die doing their jobs because they have uniforms designed for them, rather than simply wearing small men’s Kevlar vests, boots, helmets and uniforms that don’t fit.
I could go on, but I won’t because my editor already made me cut that paragraph down. This article is not going to be like my usual writing. Although, everything I’ve done over the last few years has been unusual, so maybe that’s an unnecessary caveat. I’ve scared the world witless, gotten my old editor fired, interviewed a billionaire scientist and, as some of you might remember from a few months ago, discussed dating and love with Bryony Kinsella. She told me in no uncertain terms that she felt the great question of our time is how to find love when there are no men left.
The response to that article showed me that lots of you agreed with her. So many of you, in fact, that I have never gotten a bigger response to a story in decades of writing. Lots of you asked me to speak to women who had used Adapt, and see what they thought. Lots of you told me you had found love on Adapt, which made for a wonderfully optimistic inbox on a gray winter morning.
I reached out to women I know—acquaintances, friends of friends—and found an array of experiences. Jacinda, thirty-six, went on a few dates through Adapt but found that it wasn’t for her. “I’m just not attracted to women. I wish I was, I miss having relationships, and sex, but I can’t force it. I’m hoping to meet a guy, and maybe even have kids. But if I don’t, that’s going to be okay.”
Olivia (not her real name), a twenty-five-year-old intern at an advertising agency, met her girlfriend on Adapt and is “happier than I’ve ever been. Maybe because I assumed I would never get to have a relationship so I appreciate it. Falling in love is the best feeling in the world. We’re going to be together forever.” Ah, to be twenty-five again.
I couldn’t write this article without telling Jenny’s story. Jenny is a lawyer from Chicago, and the Plague hit the city the day before her wedding. “I was sitting in a suite in the Four Seasons, watching the news with my family as it reported that all the hospital ERs were closing to men and flights were being canceled. My wedding dress was hanging on the back of a door. Two of my four bridesmaids had already canceled, and my fiancé’s parents were supposed to be flying from Canada but they were terrified of being stranded in the US.”
I asked Jenny about her parents; how were they reacting? “I told my dad we should just cancel the wedding and he was horrified. ‘I didn’t spend all this money for it to go to waste!’ he said. I think they found it easier to focus on the wedding rather than acknowledge what was happening.”
Jenny and her fiancé, Jackson, got married the next day. “The wedding was terrible. The officiant didn’t turn up. Fortunately, there was a pastor staying in the hotel. A quick-thinking hotel employee asked him to perform the wedding. He had a Southern accent and wore his coat the whole time. Maybe it was kind of wonderful. I remember looking at Jackson and thinking, ‘Remember every second of this, Jenny. It’s never going to be this good again.’ Thirty people came to the wedding in the end. Jackson’s parents weren’t there. We didn’t leave each other’s sides all night. A reception with an abundance of shrimp and champagne can be amazing or a complete disaster. Ours was a bit of both.”
After their wedding, Jenny and Jackson hibernated in their apartment. Jackson survived for another two months. Jenny says she hated the inevitably of the Plague; men will die, women will live. “It was a spectator sport. We had to watch and wait, the sexist notion of womanhood writ large by a disease. It was like in the movies when a woman says, ‘Oh, darling, stay here. Don’t go out there, it’s too dangerous! Don’t leave me behind!’ And yet that’s all I wanted to say to him. Please don’t leave me behind. Please don’t leave me behind. Please.”
Jenny first tried Adapt eleven months after Jackson died. Her friend Ellerie told her to try it. She filled in the dating app profile (nervously, having never dated online before), swiped right on a few people and organized to meet a woman with dark, curly hair whom she thought had a nice smile. Her date arranged dinner at an Italian restaurant and when she turned up, she met me.
That was three years ago. On that first date, Jenny and I talked for seven hours. She made this heartless crone feel hopeful about the future, and I’m reliably informed I made Jenny “feel like something good might happen after a long time when everything felt hopeless.” Reader, I married her.
It was a small ceremony. There was no Southern pastor wearing his coat. Our friend Kelly married us. All our friends, whom we’re still lucky enough to have with us, were able to attend. Jackson’s mom came, which was wonderful and unexpected and made Jenny cry all of her mascara off. We both wore simple white dresses. It was perfect.
When I received such an outpouring following my Bryony Kinsella article, I realized the discomfort I felt was rooted in deceit because when I wrote that article I was already with Jenny, and had been for a long time. It had always felt sensible to keep my life with her private. After the article, it felt fraudulent. And so, in typical journalistic fashion, I’m letting the world know that I’m married to a woman and getting some good copy out of it. This won’t be the last of these articles I write. Jenny and I have talked about this at length and we feel passionately that the questions surrounding love, romance, sex and relationships between women who had never previously dated women must be answered with real-life stories. There will be studies and academic analysis, of course, as there must be, but that cannot be the whole picture. I’m not sure how often I’m going to write about Jenny’s and my life together, but I promise I will. I want other women in similar positions to us to see they are not alone. Much of my work since the Plague has been focused on telling the stories of those most affected by it and this will be one facet of that.
So, I will leave you not with the story of our first dance (to “At Last” by Etta James) or the joyful challenge of decorating our first house together (I like mid-century, she likes modern; aesthetic chaos ensues), but of an argument. The only real fight we’ve ever had. I asked Jenny, two years ago, if she thought she would ever have dated a woman if Jackson hadn’t died. She nearly hit me, she was so angry. Here’s her response: “If Jackson hadn’t died, I would be married to Jackson. I never dated women before the Plague, never even considered it. I don’t know why I’ve been able to fall in love with you, Maria. There are psychologists and anthropologists and journalists and all kinds of other people busily trying to figure out women’s behavior. I don’t think it’s rocket science. I know I was lonely. I missed someone moving around in the background of the apartment as I read the New York Times on a Sunday. I missed feeling desired. I missed sex and intimacy and sharing my life with someone. I don’t think that those feelings made it inevitable that I would fall in love with a woman. But my husband was dead and I happened to go on a date with you and I fell in love. I could twist myself up in knots wondering how and why and what if but I choose not to. What’s the point? I’m happy, you’re happy. What does it matter how we got here?”