Modern Love: First the Proposal, Then the Remodeling - Modern Love

When I found Jim, I was playing Judge Beth Bornstein on the TV series “Murder One.” He was 44 and a former Marine Corps tank officer who sold I.B.M. midrange computers. I had just turned 50 and was blissfully content in my post-divorce home in the Hollywood Hills.

Seven years earlier, with the death of my marriage, I had been racked with loneliness. Then I slowly came to appreciate my own company. I could stay up all night and eat cake for breakfast. I could sing Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” at the top of my lungs while hunched over a tumbler of bourbon. I could see people if I wanted or be by myself.

Jim was living in his sister’s house in the Valley. He owned a place in Oceanside, Calif., but his sister and her husband and son had decamped for the East Coast when the earthquakes of Los Angeles became too much for them. Jim was their designated house sitter until the place was sold.

So with him to love, but happily living across town in Sherman Oaks, Calif., I had it all.

Then one night, a year after we met, Jim said, “What would you say if I asked you to marry me?”

I was expecting the question. We spent Christmas that year with his family. All the women decided he should propose.

“Yes,” I replied. “I’d say yes.”

“Good,” he said. “I just wanted to know what you’d say if I asked.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “You can’t pre-ask me to marry you. I revoke my ‘yes.’ ”

He laughed and gave me a look that said: You are so adorable.

I buried my rancor and we went along our merry, uncommitted way for another month. But on Valentine’s Day, after the in-home massages he ordered as my gift, Jim leaned across the steak dinner I made and took my hand.

“Will you marry me?” he asked again.

“Are you serious?” I replied.

“Sorry about last time,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

It would have been nice if he had made a reservation at a restaurant and bought a bauble chosen with me in mind. As it was, we were in our bathrobes and more than a little greasy. There was no ring.

All that seemed nothing compared with the joy of having Jim sitting across from me for the rest of my life. I said yes.

That night I woke out of a deep sleep, thinking, “Oh, my God, I’ll never be alone again.”

To many this would be good news, but not to me. My first marriage failed after 17 years. Our relationship had been kind but unfulfilling. I didn’t have the courage to end it on my own, but on the day he left, I felt as if someone unlocked a door and set me free. Living alone, I’d never risk getting lost in a man again.

The next morning I told Jim we didn’t have to marry. I just needed to know he wanted to.

“Oh, yes, we do,” he said. “I want everybody to know we love each other. I want it to be public.”

Backed into a corner, I asked if he would wait.

“As long as it takes,” he said, “but I’d like to move in.”

There it was, the man I loved asking me to give up my solitude and choose him over fear.

When I first dated Jim, the sweetness of his character caught me off guard. I had a list, like a lot of women do, of the attributes I wanted in a man. “Sweet” was not on it. I find that sometimes the thing I need most I don’t know about until it shows up. Then it’s: “Oh, yeah: that.” I knew I’d grieve if I lost him, so I swallowed my trepidation and we made a plan.

He would find a sitter for his sister’s place and sell his house in Oceanside. It was February, and we were going to New York in June. We decided he could move in after we returned in July. We agreed it would be a long engagement.

To absorb some of my angst, I decided to do some remodeling. I was using a small bedroom for my office, and Jim was happy to take it over for his man cave.

Linda Carlson, an actress who lives in New York and Connecticut, is working on a memoir about her life onstage and in therapy.

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