That’s the beauty of this. It’s real.

By Ellen McCarthy

The hikes Thierry Chiapello and Sharon Spradling began taking in fall 2006 were not particularly romantic.

They’d met earlier that year at the Pentagon. She was a career Air Force officer specializing in biomedical science. He was the director of the Defense Department’s Explosives Safety Board. Their jobs would require a certain amount of collaboration, so they exchanged cards and promised to be in touch.

And they were — trading messages on their BlackBerrys about work strategies, life philosophies and books they found compelling. When he signed off one Friday with a mention that he planned to hit the C&O Canal that weekend to clear his head, she replied that she’d been planning to do the same.

They decided to meet near Great Falls and set out on the trail together. Over the next few months they would log hundreds of miles, exhausting their bodies and trying, at least, to exorcise the sorrows weighing on each of them.

By then Chiapello, now 43, had been separated from his second wife for almost a year. He’d married for the first time at 27 when, as a young Marine, he found out his girlfriend was pregnant with their daughter. But the union lasted less than a year. When he walked back down the aisle at 31, it was with greater deliberateness and confidence that this relationship would last. But after two more daughters and 10 years, that marriage, too, began to crumble.

Spradling had been married for three years in her 20s, but chafed at the institution. It seemed to somehow change the way people treated her: She was someone’s wife then, not her own person. “People don’t talk to you, they talk to your husband,” she recalls. “It drove me nuts.”

For years she was happy to move around the country with the military. But she’d been in Washington longer than anyplace else, and it was here she’d carried on a 10-year relationship that had also hit the skids. By the time she and Chiapello began hiking together, the breakup was complete, though her ex-boyfriend had yet to move out of the house.

“That’s why we hiked so much — just to kind of talk about it,” says Spradling, now 44.

A 14-mile walk in the woods can breed a certain intimacy, one that deepened as they reunited on the trail every weekend. Little was left unsaid — except, perhaps, the feelings they were developing for each other. Spradling, in particular, thought there was potential, but even investing herself in that thought felt risky, she says, “because I think he was hoping, up until the last minute, that his divorce wouldn’t happen and he would have a happily ever after.

“It was pretty clear to me that wasn’t gonna happen, but you can’t tell somebody that. And you don’t even want to hope for that, really.”

It was Chiapello’s daughter, Monica, who impelled the relationship beyond the footpath. Visiting from Los Angeles over the holidays, the 16-year-old joined the two on a New Year’s Eve hike, nudging her dad at the end to invite Spradling to a family party that night.

Soon Chiapello and Spradling were seeing each other regularly, adding dinners and phone calls to their hiking routine. Chiapello’s divorce became final in March 2007, but instead of feeling like a release, the finality of it devastated him.

“You do the self-analysis: ‘What could I have done differently? How much of this was my fault?’ A lot of different issues start percolating up,” he explains. “You’ve got to take out the garbage, so to speak — about yourself. You’ve gotta clean house.”

To save himself from future heartache, he says, “I’ve often thought about joining a cloistered men’s monastery — at least for 30 seconds.”

Neither knew where the relationship was headed, but they agreed, Spradling says, “that we’d be friends no matter how it worked out.”

“There was no big rush,” Chiapello says. “And in hindsight that’s what I didn’t do in the previous two marriages: build a foundation of really getting to know someone — without any pressure of expectations for a future.”

At the end of 2007, they bought a house together. Living under the same roof proved difficult initially, so there were, just as there had been at the beginning, a lot of long talks. “It’s about communication overall. And I’m not talking about mild stuff. I’m talking about what’s really at the heart of it,” he says. “We worked through a lot of stuff. But we always came out on a better place, even on some really tough issues.”

The adage is that as people age, they become more set in their ways. Chiapello thinks the tumult of his life has instead made him more flexible. “I’ve become more tolerant over time,” he says. “I think life has really served to make me understand myself far better. And to understand what’s important and what’s not, and to appreciate what’s important and what’s not.”

During those first hard months — as he also worked to help his daughters adjust to the changes in their lives — Chiapello and Spradling paid a great deal of attention to “learning to tolerate each other’s imperfections and weaknesses.” There would be, they determined, no rose-colored glasses in this relationship. “That’s the beauty of this,” he says. “It’s real.”

When Monica came to live with them the following year, the couple began to feel frustrated with the description of Spradling as “my dad’s live-in girlfriend.” But each was still wary that marriage would somehow diminish the good thing they had going. For a while they decided to be “virtually married” and live as if they’d tied the knot, just to see how it would feel. “And that actually worked out pretty well,” he says. “So ultimately we said, ‘Let’s do it.’ ”

It took a year, but they finally set a date: Jan. 10 at Great Falls, where their relationship took root. There would be a ceremony, they decided, but no giant wedding. “We didn’t want to fall into that trap,” he says. “It’s about the rest of it — not the wedding.”

Before Spradling woke that morning, Chiapello sent her an e-mail. “As experience and understanding of who I really am becomes more evident on this constant journey called life, my shortcomings and mistakes become increasingly evident,” he wrote. But, he continued, “I commit to giving you my best day in and day out.”

As ice floated by on the Potomac and freezing winds blasted their dark overcoats, the two exchanged simple vows. And the guest list that day totaled seven, including their three dogs.

Source: The Washington Post