He was wearing a new shirt and shoes. He was wearing an old sweater and sneakers. He arrived early. I arrived late.
“I know you once said you didn’t like waiting alone in public places,” she said by way of explanation. I ordered a drink and started telling her stories about a man she was in love with but who no longer loved me.
It was supposed to be a blind date, set up by my sister, who worked at the same magazine as Will. Except he wasn’t exactly blind, because she had seen Will before. I was a student at the time and recently moved from Manchester to London.
He was a hard-drinking Southern writer who worked for a men’s magazine. One night I walked by a party the magazine was throwing and saw Will from across the room. He had hair the color of scrambled eggs and he was drunk screaming at the top of his lungs at no one in particular.
‘What an idiot,’ I remember thinking, and I left.
Friends First: Ambika Mod as Emma Morley and Leo Woodall as Dexter Mayhew in the Netflix series One Day, based on the book
Farrah and Will Storr: One day, almost five years after they met, their friendship turned into love… and then into marriage.
I agreed to the date because I was heartbroken: feeling desired by another man seemed like at least a way to try to remedy that.
Will listened patiently as I grieved the loss of a relationship I was never fully in. Then he finished his drink, paid the bill and told me that he had to leave.
I ran into him months later at an art exhibition. He came and said hello. We laugh at the quote. I felt able to be myself when he was around. That was a new feeling for me.
I was 21 years old and still not confident in my worldview. I borrowed opinions, phrases and points of view from other people. But not when she was with Will.
The time in our lives when we became friends is significant in many ways. The year before, Will had stopped drinking. By his own admission, he was a “mess” before we met: drinking, drugs, alienating people when he was drunk.
I needed someone I could watch movies with, travel with, spend a night with and who wasn’t in the pub. She was hurt and she didn’t want to get me romantically close to another man, but she wanted a friend she could deal with.
Our friendship began little by little: trips to exhibitions, lunches, walks around London. He was already an award-winning writer, known for his raunchy, gonzo-style journalism. He desperately wanted to be a writer, but instead he worked the door at the members’ club, Soho House. Will lent me good books to read and talked about writing with a passion he had never seen before.
Unlike Dexter and Emma, the characters in David Nicholls’s novel One Day, we were not from different social classes, although we were from different ends of the country: he from Tunbridge Wells, me from Salford.
Farrah and Will on their wedding day
But he was different from all the other men she had ever known. He listened to classic film scores while walking the streets of London at night because he enjoyed it. Everyone he knew at that stage in my life pretended to be someone else. But not Will.
A few months into our friendship, a girlfriend let me down at the last minute when we were supposed to go to Stockholm together for a three-night mini getaway. So I asked Will. “Okay,” was his response. And we left.
All the things I wanted to do (travel, walk, or bike around the city until the early hours) I could do because Will was with me.
I also made him feel more confident to conquer the world.
Without alcohol, he told me, he felt uncomfortable in social situations: speechless and in a bad mood. But not when I was with him.
When we landed back at Luton Airport we stayed and ate roast potatoes in a terrible airport cafe just so we could spend a few more hours in each other’s company.
A few years later, during a brief getaway together to Paris, I convinced him to come shopping with me. I tried on coat after coat until I finally found a pretty buttercup yellow mac. I asked Will to take a photo of me with him.
He did so and then abruptly left the store. Years later, he admitted that he was overcome with sadness at the thought of me wearing that coat with another man.
I also had my own moments. Like the night we went to a concert and he had started to grow a little beard. I remember being surprised by how handsome he was, something I had never noticed before.
“I imagine you’re like that,” I remember saying to him on the train home. He looked horrified, so I laughed. But all I wanted to do was kiss him.
When I was 25, we had known each other for almost five years. Finally I was a writer in a magazine; he had just gotten his first book deal.
Then, the older man I had been in love with all those years ago came into my life again, unexpectedly. This man, whom he had put on a pedestal for years, seemed thin in comparison to Will: less thoughtful, less generous, certainly less sensitive, and not half as funny, smart, or even handsome.
I spent much of my 20s fearing that I would remain in desperate, unrequited love with this man for the rest of my life. Now, almost overnight, it was all over.
Will had rescued me. But Will and I didn’t get back together right after that. It would be too clear a conclusion. Six months later, in the summer of 2003, it happened.
Even though I had dated men several times over the course of our friendship, Will had never really dated. He had gone to Glastonbury without me and then phoned me the first night there, with the music blaring in the background.
“It’s not the same without you,” he shouted over the noise. “There are all these funny things and no one finds them as funny as I know you would.”
I remember the pleasure I felt at feeling strange; when needed. Then there was a pause. “But I have met someone.” . .’
When I heard that, my body turned into a snowball of emotions: panic, sadness, fear. The last four and a half years of our time together suddenly flashed before my eyes. If Will met someone, he was likely to fall in love and then I would lose him completely. He knew he couldn’t let that happen.
“Why don’t you go back to London?” I said.
He immediately left the festival and took the first train. I found myself combing my hair, choosing the right clothes, putting on lipstick.
He arrived at my apartment shortly before midnight. She walked through the door and we kissed like lovers who hadn’t seen each other in years. Behind that kiss was every mini-break we’d taken, every walk around London, every laugh we’d had.
It was a relationship that had become something much more than friendship. Friendship with love? Maybe. Or the love that disguised itself as friendship as we found our feet in the world.
Today I am 45 years old; Will is closer to 50. He has known me for more than half my life. I know him more deeply than anyone in his life.
I remember reading One Day in 2009. Instead of a big love story, I saw it as a small love story, one in which Dexter and Emma’s relationship grows through small, everyday acts of friendship.
I was glad that a book had finally recognized the role a great friendship can play in a love story, rather than the silly notions of “instant connections made in a room full of people” that had populated the culture when I was growing up. and that they had misinformed my ideas about relationships.
I recently read an article by the author of the book that highlights this. “(One Day) is an epic love story,” he writes. “But looking back at it now, it seems to me to be a book primarily about friendship, about our ability to improve the lives of others through conversation and caring.”
I hope all the lost 21 year old women watching this Netflix series realize that too.
Farrah Storr writes the Things Worth Knowing newsletter.
Visit Farrah Storr’s substack at farrah.substack.com.