Transcription Episode 7:

All is love (Nina & Darren)

October 10, 2019

Listen to Nina & Darren’s episode (available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Himalaya and Google Play) and hear their full stories from our ‘Like in the Movies’ 2018 live show.

Clara Davis: You're listening to Unravel, the podcast, where we go behind and beyond stories featured at our monthly live shows. From Shanghai, I'm your host, Clara Davis.

STORY CLIP 1

Nina: So tonight, I would like to share with you all a great love story. So Darren, who you met earlier, probably thinks this is going to be about us, but it's not. Tonight’s love story is going to be about Jenny and Terry, my parents-in-law.

So every time we go visit, Jenny tells me the story of how she and her husband met. So as teenagers in the early 50’s, she was set up to go to a dance with a boy and when she met this boy she didn't like him, but who did strike her fancy was the date that her friend came with, and yes, you guessed it, it was Terry.

So of course, after checking with her friend who was okay with her, she cornered Terry in the parking lot as one does, and said, “Drive me home” and that’s what he did, obviously. 

CD: We are so excited to bring you this very special episode. Our August 2018 ‘Like in the Movies’ show featured an Unravel first: two halves of a couple, Nina and Darren, shared a story on the same night. They met in 2014 here in Shanghai - Darren, a creative director and Nina, a junior executive at an ad agency. They had a 21-year-gap between them and very different world views, but they came together to form an extremely special bond and they married not too long before they shared their stories on the Unravel stage.

Today we'll play clips from both Nina and Darren’s stories and we have them both in studio.

You just heard a clip from Nina’s story which focuses in on Darren's parents, her in-laws, and specifically how they are coping with his mom, Jenny's dementia diagnosis. This led Nina to new revelations about her own marriage, which made her stress to the point of developing a bald patch, which she and Darren lovingly called Cedric. We loved having both Nina and Darren here in the studio with us to share their love story.

INTERVIEW

Clara Davis: This was the first time and the only time that we've ever had a married couple tell a story at the same show, which was amazing and everybody was, as we all remember, in tears and stitches and yeah, it was so sweet, but how did it feel for you guys going into that show, knowing that each of you was telling a story that most likely involved the other, but you weren't totally clear in what it was? 

Nina: So my story started about the relationship between my parents-in-law, because I felt like what I saw in their relationship was something that maybe Darren couldn’t see as clearly so I felt like I needed to articulate for my own sake. You know, like what was this magical bond between them?

And it's not like your fairy tale bond where everyone's holding hands, and you know, standing in the face of adversity and together. It wasn't anything like that. It's really, really, really tough.

But as I was writing it, I just felt like, okay I've told their story, and then I thought about it, and I said, “Why do I feel so inclined to tell their story?” You know a lot of self-reflection and then I realized that maybe because it actually brought out this subconscious thing that I wasn't dealing with in my own marriage, which was the age difference between Darren and I. And I guess it was a cathartic experience like it was the first time I told the story at Unravel, it was very cathartic, but I think it was more important for me to be okay with the fact that even after I articulated the story, it would still be painful.

I don't think the story is supposed to just tie everything in a nice bow and then you move on. I think that's okay, and I'm starting to be more okay with that. My lovely friend Cedric has not returned.

Darren: Your bald patch.

Nina: Yes, thank you, Darren, for clarifying.

Darren: It was very bald though, wasn’t it?

 Nina: It was very bald, yes, it was very shiny. So my bald patch on my head, to be clear, has not returned, which I think is a sign of, maybe it's maturity, or it's just time.

I think we're starting to find our identity beyond just the older husband and the younger wife, which is what I kind of saw us as when we first got married. I got really nervous in public, because I was actually very self-conscious like, oh what, you know, what, do people look at us and think he's like the rich white guy, and I'm like, I felt so self-conscious.

Darren: Or even my nurse. 

Nina: Or I was a nurse, yes, you know, that's not like me.

CD: There are even more layers to that than I understood. 

Nina: That’s not like me, like I'm not that kind of person, but it just really affected me and I think it wasn't really because of the image, it was more of what that represented, and I just felt like I had to kind of peel away a few layers to really be able to articulate what that issue was. I think I've gone to the crux a bit. We went to therapy once and I basically therapized myself. She just sat there looking at me being like, “Mhmm, mhmm.” 

CD: “You got this!” 

Nina: “Yeah, you’re right, this is a really, really good.”  

Darren: Yeah, it was like a therapy session at the gym or something, it was very weird, but she basically started talking and then we were like, yeah okay and then we just had a conversation amongst ourselves and said a bunch of things to me like, "Oh okay, so that's what the issue is and that's how we need to look at this now, so I think we're okay so.” And then we left. It just became apparent that the fact there is an age difference and time for us, it may be perceived differently in a sense, that that's what makes this special. If we were probably the same age, it wouldn't have this other element, this untouchable, unknowable thing that that I think it has. 

STORY CLIP 2

Darren: So for a guy from a small town, place of no aspirations, a place where the education system is designed to get you ready for a lifetime working in a factory, to find myself living in New York City came as a bit of a surprise. I met a girl in the UK who was an exchange student, and I follow her to America, to New York, and it’s there that we got married and we were to start a life in one of the greatest cities in the world. The plan was that we were going to become artists. We acquired everything that you need for such a life, we had the industrial loft space on lower east side of Manhattan. We had the friends that painted, that wrote, that made films, and we painted and we wrote, and we made films. It was hopelessly idealistic, deeply romantic, but it's a life that we built that we dreamed of for just the two of us, but as the 90’s turned into the north of the 2000’s, I became aware that it wasn't just the two of us. Some of those friends that wrote, painted, made films, had actually been sleeping with my wife. 

Clara Davis: Shortly after this revelation of infidelity, Darren's wife revealed she was pregnant, but was unsure who the father was. After she decided to terminate the pregnancy, Darren decided to end the marriage and leave New York City and this painful past behind him, falling into what he called a 15-year-long depression, closing himself off to the possibility of new relationships and love.

We know now he finally found that with Nina. They were newly married at the time he told this story, so I was curious whether hearing each other's stories led them to learn anything new about one another.

INTERVIEW

Clara Davis: Nina, how did it feel to hear Darren’s story without having any preview or did you have a preview?

Nina: Did not have a preview. 

Darren: No. 

Nina: What I did hear through the sound of Clara sobbing next to me. 

CD: Oh right, yeah. 

Nina: I was, I mean both of us were ugly crying, but we took ugly crying to the next level. It's not even moved, it's...okay, so I consider myself an empathetic person, but, but no, but’s the wrong word, furthermore, during Darren’s story, I loved what he said about me. I, of course, I loved that, but I think what really, really stuck with me was when he was talking about life before me, 'cause he never talks about that, I mean he’ll joke about it you know, but he never really talks about it. To hear him really lay out his pain, I would call it, 'cause it was a very painful experience what happened to him, in that setting and the way that he did it, that really touched me.

I wasn't crying when he was talking about our love and things like that, but I just felt like his pain was so visceral and it was so relatable in a strange way. He made it so relatable that I was just like, I cannot have imagined what he went through. And for somebody you love that much to know that they went through something like that, you know that just really hurts your heart. And I think that's what really moved to me and there's photographic evidence, but I was just, I was done, that was it.

CD: Darren, how did it feel to hear Nina’s story and in that, your parents' story told from her perspective? 

Darren: Well, at first I was absolutely furious that it wasn't just about me. 

CD: Naturally. 

Darren: Once I got over that, I think it took me by surprise, because you know, Nina doesn’t always tell you everything that she's thinking or seeing or that, and so I didn't really know what she had sort of thought about my parents or how she kind of interpreted or digested their relationship. You know, we'd been visited a bunch of times and when we go, we spend a lot of time with my parents. We're in like one house, it's either in their house in the home town that I grew up in, which is quite small house, so you're very close together, or they have a house in Wales on the coast, but still, we're very close together. So you know, you're seeing everything, and I guess for Nina, seeing a lot of things for the first time, maybe also seeing me trying to process and deal with all of this stuff and I guess just to hear how she had interpreted that or what it meant to, took me by surprise, maybe made me think about my parents' relationship in a way that I in some ways had forgot because the focus now is about something else. It's not about the amazing life that they've lived and how they met and the people that they were. So in a way it meant a lot just to take a step back and be like, oh yeah, that that's how they were, that's what my mom was at one time. She was quite ambitious and quiet sort of strong-willed to go after the things that she wanted to go after, such as my dad, that dirty mechanic. 

CD: I mean hearing the story, I certainly noticed similarities between Nina and your mom.

Darren: I guess I didn't really put those two things together. You know, I always thought that the reason I was attracted to Nina and we had this relationship is because she was very different than my mom. 

CD: Of course. 

Darren: In a lot of ways she is very different, but in some ways, at the core of it, maybe there is some similarity. There’s the, you know, there's a real stubbornness. If my mom makes her mind up about something, that's it, she's doing that, she's going, can't stop it. And Nina is very, very much the same. If she's like, okay I'm gonna do that, you know, like the first time she said I'm gonna do Unravel, she was like, I'm doing that, and then she just kind of did it. That was the only thing that was going on for like several days, and it's like, okay, that's that determination. And I guess that's where there is some commonality between you and my mom and also you're sort of mildly unhealthy obsession with dogs.

CD: You share that with her? 

Darren: You got sort of that strong will and that sort of tenderness, you know. 

Nina: That’s sweet, thank you. 

STORY CLIP 3:

Nina: So three years ago, Jenny was diagnosed with dementia, and dementia had waited decades, her entire life, after she collected all these memories and then it promptly launched itself into her head, and is now erasing everything she holds dear bit by bit. It’s taking away her eyesight, so with her eyesight, it's taking away her love for painting, for sculpting, for reading, for writing. As I became part of Darren’s family, I joined this journey of Jenny’s, and as expected, it's very, very difficult. And of course, it's riddled with pain, but what I didn't expect was Jenny's dementia has taught me a lesson that's fundamentally changed my marriage and my life. And it's taught me that grief is a gift.  Grief is what has brought out the best in Jenny’s husband,Terry. Every waking moment, he's his kindest, most selfless self and he puts away all of his needs to take of Jenny day in and day out.

He works tirelessly to find these little windows of opportunity where he can make her laugh, he can make her giggle and it warms my heart when his face lights up when she does, because I think, wow after all these years, that feeling of accomplishment you get for making your wife laugh, it never really, it never really goes away. And grief is what’s made their lucid moments and their moments of connection, however fleeting they may be, all the more precious and all the more special. 

Clara Davis: The lesson that Jenny and Terry taught Nina is one that changed her perspective on the age difference between her and Darren. In Darren’s story, we got to hear about how their relationship first started from his perspective, and when we got them both in the studio together, we got the opportunity to hear the other side of how that love story started.

INTERVIEW

Clara Davis: This all started in an office, an office romance, the joys…  

Darren: Yeah, it's a classic. 

CD: Yeah it’s a classic. How did that actually, what was that instant? Was there immediate chemistry? Was there a spark from one of you to the other, or was that a slow and steady burn?

Darren: I think Nina should answer this, because it was quite different. 

Nina: Okay, so once upon a time, I was a very young, innocent...okay, that's a lie, let's start again. Once upon a time, I was a very young, ambitious girl who thought, okay, I'm going to join the biggest ad agency in the world, and I'm gonna kick ass, which was at that time Ogilvy to me. So when I arrived at Olgivy, I had that that mindset that I'm really gonna go after what I wanted, which at the time I thought was gonna be a career path, but it turned out that the...[to Darren] can I say you’re bald? 

So then of course, there's the bald, angry British. 

CD:  Oh I love angry, British...and bald. 

Nina: They're the best, the best. You know all that testosterone, oh my gosh. Just like   practically smoking.  

CD: Pent up, yeah. 

Darren: Yeah, it was pretty pent. 

Nina: Very pent. So he was sitting in the corner, he had the corner office, and you could just see his lovely head above the cubicle. 

Darren: Catching the light.

Nina:  And he was just always swearing at his computer, which I found very attractive, and so I thought, okay, I need to know this guy.

We would always go out to this wine bar downstairs, it's called Enoterra and we would all go as a group after work, and I would just always find a way to make sure that Darren’s wine glass was always full. You know, like you kind of perfect the wink at the waiter and he comes over and he’s like..

So during was pretty much wasted every single day of the week and I would be there to, I guess you would call it…

Darren: Take advantage. 

Nina:  Take advantage, yes. Well, yeah, I would take advantage of him and kind of bully him into going back home with me. That sounds really bad, but it took a year, so which in hind side is a very long time. And then finally, it's on and off. Will they, won’t they, classic, will they, won't they love affair. Until one day, I think it was like maybe eight or nine months into this messing about, I was downstairs at the wine bar and I said, “Darren can we talk?” I think we were breaking for the holiday and I wanted some closure on, you know, what was going on. 

And so Darren's like, “Yes, I'm coming down, let's talk” and I knew that Darren was gonna come down and say, “This is not a good idea, I'm gonna break it off.” So he got downstairs, and he sat down. We were sitting at the bar on those high stools and Darren was was like, “This is not a good idea. You're the young account executive, which I was super junior, and I'm the angry creative director. This is not gonna end well, it's not gonna reflect well in your career, it's gonna be distracting.”

And I was like, “That's all bullshit. You don't believe a word of what you just said.”

And I basically just called him out. I said, “What are you so afraid of? What is the worst that could happen?’ At this point I didn't know that he went through a terrible divorce, so he could have said, well the worst that could happen...so I didn't know that obviously, but I think I called you a coward, I think I actually used the word ‘coward’. 

Darren: You used the C word. 

Nina: I used the C word, yes, and then I called you a coward. And then I remember this moment so clearly. Darren’s face kind of changed. He had this very defensive stance one moment and then when I said that, he kind of had this weird look like he was almost, almost liberated in a sense. I don't know if that sounds weird, but it felt like your face just relaxed. And then after that we went on a company trip, and we never left the bedroom.

Darren: That's true, because I think I was so deeply buried in my own kind of world and shit and darkness, like why am I in Shanghai? I can’t stop drinking. I basically, I had a job that I was still trying to figure out how to do, and so I don't think I was really like open to noticing things that may be right in front of me.

STORY CLIP 4

Darren: Something profound had happened, I began to shut down. I switched off all my emotions, I went deep inside, and I took all of that love that I had, and I buried it deep in a dark corner in my battered soul, where nobody could get to it.

That is until 15 years later. I’m living in Shanghai, I'm single. And I'm drinking a lot and I'm eating like a champion. S ome nights I see the guy from Sherpa’s twice in one night. 

But I have managed to crash through a decade and a half and keep everybody at bay, nobody has got inside and there have been some valiant attempts. None of them could have prepared me for what I was about to encounter. 

This girl was different. She had half a shaved head, she wore braces that made her talk with a little lisp, she curiously mispronounced certain words, seemingly randomly, in-naw-vi-tive for innovative, which is in-naw-vi-tive, if you think about it, at least I thought it was. She had tattoos, lots of tattoos, one on her chest of a broken mechanical heart and she was in possession of a determination and a self-confidence that defied her age. What she said to me, shook me to my core and she said, "Why won't you even try? How do you know that this won’t be something truly amazing?”

And it was like the whole world when CGI, I was struck by lighting, the clouds parted, the sun and the moon rose at the same time, the stars came in, flowers sprung up, I think I even saw a  rainbow, and 15 years of pain and loneliness and wallowing in my own self-imposed darkness were just gone. 

She came over and maybe it was the food, maybe it was something else, because after that she just didn't leave. Some time after that this girl called Nina became my wife and she was right. This is something truly amazing.

Nina: My husband is slightly older than I am. And the inevitable implications of this, when we first got married, caused me overwhelming anxiety, and to be honest, quite deep sadness, but as I watched Jenny and Terry face their demons, I suddenly realized that maybe I don't need to deny myself of my grief, because it's actually what makes my marriage so special, and it's what makes our moments together so unique and so memorable, and it reminds me to imprint every single moment we have as hard as I can into my head and into my heart. So what grief has gifted me is to never take anything for granted in my marriage. And that I think is the most precious gift of all.  

Clara Davis: This is about the time I started to ugly cry. There is something so powerful and poignant, about the commitment Nina and Darren made and continue to make to one another.

This was Nina’s second story she shared on the Unravel stage. At the end of our conversation, we talked about how she got from where she left us in her first story to where she took us in her second. I love going deeper into Nina and Darren's love story with both of them here in the studio and I'm so grateful for how open and vulnerable they were with us.

INTERVIEW 

Clara Davis: When you first told a story at Unravel, it was about a destructive sounding relationship that did have a very happy ending because it ended with the partner, the husband that was sitting in front of you in the room. So we got a little teaser back then of this guy. So how did you know that Darren was the partner? How did you feel sure or assured?

Nina: So Darren knows this by the way, so this is not gonna be some storming out of the room situation.

CD: Oh thank god. I don't know that we can accommodate that. 

Darren: I mean you kind of set it up to be, like I might just do it.

Nina: So when we first got together, I wasn't like, I'm gonna marry that guy. No, but somewhere down the line, I remember certain tidbits of moments where that realization started creeping in like, oh maybe this is actually something that could turn into something serious.

And at the time, I think what really made him partner material was the fact that he was just...what’s the word? This is gonna sound a bit trite, but he just really liked, well I guess, loved things about me that were just really, really me. You know, he didn't try to change the way that I dressed, and he just really, really appreciated me for who I was.

I think it was also because I could really see him getting along with my mom because my mother is the kind of person who, she can read people very quickly. I felt like if she met Darren, there was nothing bad she could say about him and when they met, I was right. She said he'll take care of the house, he'll take care of you when you have kids, he'll take care of the kids, he just, he's very much a husband as one would want one to be like. The one thing I was worried about was that she was going to just see age, but my mother was able to not be as shallow as I was when we first got together and she was like, I think you guys met at the perfect time, you know there's some things that you give up to get other things in return. Maybe the one thing you gave up was time, but what you got in return was probably a perfect marriage. 

Darren: We had discussions before I met before I met your mom, because at the time I had quite a bit of a beard, which was, I wouldn't say it was salt and pepper, it was salt and ginger. And we did have like one discussion where I was just like, should I just dye my beard, just comb some of that weird dye into it? But literally when I met your mom, we just got along immediately, there's just stuff to talk about. We talked about gardening and house plants and I don't know, we just seemed to have things in common even though we couldn't be more different in so many ways.

CD: When did you meet her parents for the first time?

Darren: After we had been living together for quite a while, because Nina like literally after this infamous company trip came to my house and really did never go home, which was amazing. In a sense, and so she would go and visit her parents to have dinner on the weekend and they had no idea this was going on, and she didn't tell them. And so then your driver at the time would drop you off kind of in the vicinity of my house, and she would come home, and I'd be like, well  aren’t they gonna ask like, “Where are you going? We're dropping you, why are you going over there?” 

CD: Yeah, this isn’t your apartment. 

Darren: Yeah, and I think we lived together for about six months or something and it was like, at some point, we have to tell them. And I think I was on some like company trip and you told your parents and I was in this big conference that was usual kind of company conference type of thing, and I had to step out to have a phone call with you. And you said like, “I've told my parents.” And it was like, “Oh, god.” So there were a number of things that they were concerned about and I guess they had questions about me. Your dad being a lawyer was like, he said,
Has he been married before? Does he have kids? What’s the deal with him?” Which I think is quite sensible in a way, because I could just be here hiding from something. 

CD: Your other life, right? 

Darren: And so then it was like he wanted to see divorce papers and I was like, “Oh my god, it's really quite serious.” Which then I had to get, which that was not easy at all, because they're in New York City and we're here. So, there was quiet some hoops to go through, but basically I got him a copy of the divorce papers in like two days and he saw them and was just like okay and that was that, that was it.

CD: What brought your parents to Shanghai?

Nina: My mom has always been the breadwinner in the family. So she joined GE fresh out of her MBA in the US. My dad and my mom are both from Beijing and they left Beijing, during the Cultural Revolution. They were sent, one of the first students sent out to study abroad, so my mom was, you know, she was a kind of student who would read under the covers with her flashlight until 5 in the morning, just for the pure pleasure of reading. So she was always very, very studious, and she joined GE fresh out of school, and she stayed with them for about 35 years, so they would send her around the world and then to Shanghai.

CD: Aside from keeping you in Shanghai years longer than you planned, what is the biggest impact that Nina has had on you, Darren? 

Darren: I think in a way she's made me a lot calmer, as she sort of mentioned before, there was a period when I was quite angry. It was just my natural state. I still am a bit angry at times, I think it’s just in my DNA, but I think I would get kind of worked up about small things. I'd become obsessed with small things like I couldn’t kind of zoom out and see a bigger picture or compartmentalize things and she's kinda really helped me to be able to do that, to arrange things in that way that I don't get so sort of wound up about things.

There's not really one thing, it's many, many things to general happiness, you know, and I think it just boils down to it's as simple as that, as waking up in the morning and being like "Oh yeah, this is alright.” 

CD: I'm so glad that we were able to get you guys here tonight, thanks for bringing these vegan, gluten-free lemon raspberry bars. You guys both telling a story at that show was one of the biggest highlights of all the shows that we’ve ever had, so I’m so happy that we got to have you guys both in here to talk about the stories and also just yeah, get to know you guys a little bit better, so thank you so much for coming. 

Darren: It’s been wonderful. 

Nina: Thank you, we’ve really enjoyed it, I think it was an experience that we talk about a lot that makes us even more insufferable with our friends, but it definitely is also a highlight. 

CD: Yeah, that really went down in Unravel history.

Darren: Well, we're glad to be part of that history of something so special. So it means a lot. 

Nina: Thank you. 

CD: Thanks guys. 

Clara Davis: A very special thanks to Nina and Darren for sharing their stories with us and spending time with us in the studio. Today's episode featured clips from their stories, but you can listen to the full versions at www.unravelstorytelling.com.

This podcast is produced and edited by Sarah Boorboor with original music and post-production by Ricardo Valdez. We're recording in the Nowness studio in the city where love actually is all around, Shanghai. I'm your host and the founder of Unravel, Clara Davis. Thanks for being a part of our story.  

On the season finale of Unravel, hear from Carms Malvone our sagest storyteller to date. 

Carms Malvone: There was a release within me. I think it's because in my heart, I felt I lost the most important thing in my life. What could happen to me now? And finding this kind of an attitude, it allows me to not take bullshit from anybody.