Her friends’ job was to keep Chokechaitanasin in check and be supportive during her period of celibacy. In the two years leading up to that note, she’d called off an engagement, but continued to date her former fiance while also going on dates with other men. By the time she sent that e-mail, she had broken ties with all of them. “Life was just getting very complicated and I was like, ‘You know what? I just need to relax,’ ” she recalls.
The next day Chokechaitanasin, then 30, climbed into Clint Locker’s car and told him of the plan. She and Locker, 28, had been in overlapping groups of friends for years, often seeing each other at bars and parties around Arlington. That day, they were headed to Virginia’s Lake Anna for a weekend that revolved around their fantasy football league draft pick.
“I was cracking up. Because I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard,” Locker says of Chokechaitanasin’s pledge. “And I was trying to understand why it got to that point.”
He asked what would happen if she met someone really special. She told him the guy would just have to wait.
That night the two hung out with a big group of friends, laughing and sitting around a bonfire. The next night was more of the same, but the drinks were flowing a little more freely. Locker and Chokechaitanasin found themselves alone and they kissed.
Perhaps it had been coming for years. Each had the inklings of a crush on the other for a while, but they’d never been single at the same time.
The next morning Chokechaitanasin woke up with a headache and the realization that she’d broken her pledge. “But I wasn’t thinking anything of it,” she says. “We’re in the country. No one knows. It’s like a lost weekend.”
She figured they would never speak of what happened and that it wouldn’t happen again. But Locker had different intentions. “I was attracted to her. I was happy we got to know each other better and I was looking forward to calling her and going out again,” he says.
She was surprised and impressed when he e-mailed the next day to say he’d had a good time — and that his fantasy team was going to trounce hers. He began to call and text regularly.
But on top of her pledge, there were other complications. A buddy of Locker’s had been pursuing Chokechaitanasin; her friend was interested in Locker. They hung out on the sly, to see if there was something real between them. There was.
“I just thought that he was good-looking, funny, charming and just a good person,” she says. “A really nice person.”
He was attracted to her strong personality and well-formed opinions. “I loved hanging out with her. I loved being with her,” he says. After a month they came out to their friends (who were not entirely surprised).
The following summer, the cousin Locker had been living with got married, so he proposed the idea of moving in with Chokechaitanasin. She thought it was a little fast, but agreed. They were both busy and independent, so the little time they had together felt precious.
After living in her one-bedroom condo for a year they decided it was time to look for a house. “We really didn’t follow that road map, where you get married and then buy the house. We didn’t believe in it,” says Locker, now 33 and working for a defense contractor. “I was committed to June and we both thought it was going further.”
In December 2009 they found a brick Colonial in Arlington. As they spent the next year making the home their own, it became clear that they wanted to marry.
“In all my previous relationships I was never content,” says Chokechaitanasin, now 34 and a real estate project manager for the District. “I was always thinking there’d be something better. I just didn’t feel settled. When I met him, I just felt it was right. It was good, and there were no doubts, which is how I knew.”
Chokechaitanasin came home one night in December 2010 to find all the lights off. Locker told her the power had gone out. But on the snowy backyard, he’d spelled out “Will U Marry Me?” in lights.
“Absolutely,” she replied.
On Dec. 17 they were married at the Carnegie Institution near Logan Circle. Guests peered over the balcony as Chokechaitanasin descended a circular staircase to meet her groom in the white marble rotunda. A passage from “The Velveteen Rabbit” was read and the two placed letters in a wooden box with a bottle of wine, promising to read the letters and drink the wine on their first anniversary, and to repeat the tradition each year of their marriage.
And Chokechaitanasin made a new pledge: This one, for keeps.
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