For the Rock Star, Love Has Finally Landed

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/fashion/weddings/for-the-rock-star-love-has-finally-landed.html

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The rock star and the music lover met at a record store, fell in love and got married. There were only 16 years, a separate marriage, two continents and a slew of text messages in between.

Their story began at Earwax Records in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2000, as the neighborhood’s gentrification was just beginning to accelerate. She was Emily Bidwell, a Mayflower descendant with a degree in fine arts and sculpture from Hampshire College, who had headed to bohemia in search of cheap studio space. He was Matthew Caws, a New Yorker with a jangly rock band, Nada Surf, who was navigating the vertiginous trajectory of fame.

Mr. Caws began working at the record shop as he reeled from the early success of a single, “Popular,” which dominated MTV in the summer of 1996, and the bruising crash to reality that followed it. And though Ms. Bidwell was rock ’n’ roll reverent, and had spent her college years seeing live shows with a friend and fellow Earwax employee, Alex Holden, when she first saw Mr. Caws in the store, she did not know who he was.

“I had been buried in Williamsburg,” she said. “I didn’t have a television or anything. I had no idea that Matthew was famous.”

Earwax was the type of enthusiast’s paradise where on any given day there might be no Clash records “yet a huge ambient noise section,” Mr. Caws remembered. (The year they met, the movie “High Fidelity” came out, about a record store run by curmudgeonly obscurantists, and posters advertising the film went up across the street from Earwax. “It was like we worked in that store,” Mr. Caws said.)

There they bonded quickly, hanging out during shifts. Mr. Caws was taken by her kindness, even to those poor unfortunates who dared to come to the store looking for popular music. Ms. Bidwell was charmed when she put one of the rock-nerd’s Zen koans — “Beatles or Stones?” — to Mr. Caws, and he responded, “Can I say the Kinks?”

But Ms. Bidwell was involved with another Earwax employee, who would later become her first husband, and Mr. Caws was dating around. She nurtured an innocent crush — “It caught up to me. All of a sudden I realized: I’m acting funny around this person,” she said — but nothing came to pass. Record stores are transient spaces, especially for musicians with gigs to get to, as Mr. Caws was. In 2001, he moved on to pursue his career.

The following years were eventful for both. Mr. Caws and Nada Surf recorded and toured the world. Ms. Bidwell left the store, married her Earwax boyfriend and landed at Etsy, the online marketplace, as one of its earliest hires. She is now its senior merchandising specialist, curating assortments of Etsy goods and promoting Etsy to the wider world. She has appeared on “Good Morning America” and in the pages of The Wall Street Journal on behalf of the company, and once narrated an all-Etsy fashion show on Martha Stewart’s talk show.

Though they had largely fallen out of touch, she had not forgotten Mr. Caws, and in October 2012, Mr. Holden, who had stayed in touch with both, invited them to dinner as an Earwax reunion. Ms. Bidwell, whose first marriage had ended, assumed it was a setup — incorrectly, as it turns out. “It hadn’t even occurred to me,” Mr. Holden said.

Intentional or not, they laughed and caught up over dinner (Ms. Bidwell described swooning to a German-accented impression by Mr. Caws), and their mutual interest was reignited. “I was re-smitten, more smitten,” Mr. Caws said. “Some people just live in a happier place, and she seems to live in a very happy place. She had had a strong imprint in my mind; I always wondered about her.”

But Mr. Caws had fathered a son, Theodore, in 2004, in a brief relationship. Theodore and his mother lived in England, and Mr. Caws decided to move there to be closer to his son.

“I was so sure he was going to ask me out that night,” Ms. Bidwell said. “Instead, he told me he was leaving for Cambridge.”

Distance may have made Mr. Caws leery of forging a relationship, but it did not prevent him from asking her out on a subsequent trip back to New York. He devoted so much thought to the matter that he barely realized that it was nearly a year later by the time he actually did.

On Sept. 2, 2013, Mr. Caws and Ms. Bidwell went on their first date, to Black Mountain Winehouse, a bar in Gowanus, Brooklyn, where she had moved. They talked for hours, then adjourned to a pair of Adirondack chairs on the terrace.

“I remember that first date — people say ‘brilliant’ in that English way, but in my memory it has so much light,” Ms. Bidwell said. “I think of his face, and it was bright and alive. We were really listening to each other and really curious about each other.”

The next week, they went out again. They talked music and life; they adjourned to her apartment to watch episodes of “Geordie Shore,” England’s answer to “Jersey Shore.” (Mr. Caws’s father is English, and he holds dual citizenship.)

When Mr. Caws returned to Cambridge, the two kept talking, mostly via text message, as Mr. Caws traveled around Europe to perform. (In addition to Nada Surf, he conceived a side project, Minor Alps, with the singer Juliana Hatfield.) It was an epistolary courtship not without side effects — “I’ve become someone who writes such long texts that I’ve forgotten it’s a faux pas,” Ms. Bidwell said — but it allowed them to share their lives and reveal themselves to each other slowly and deliberately.

The distance was challenging and gave them pause, Mr. Caws especially. In May 2015, at a happy but uncertain point in their relationship, Ms. Bidwell told Mr. Caws she loved him. He hesitated in the moment, but realized on his way back to England that he couldn’t leave without telling her he loved her, too. He made his airport-bound taxi idle outside Ms. Bidwell’s office so he could say it back.

Autumn de Wilde, a photographer and friend of Mr. Caws, saw a complementary quality in Ms. Bidwell. “Matthew floats just above the earth,” she said. “I think that he needs someone like Emily to help bring him down to earth and make the ground less punishing.”

The couple began to take trips together (to Ibiza, Spain; to Joshua Tree Park in California; to Mr. Caws’s family’s home in France). She would join him for a few days on the road during tours, and they always reconnected when Mr. Caws returned to New York.

“Matthew always says to me when he sees me, ‘Oh my God, you’re real!’” Ms. Bidwell said with a laugh.

In January, when he was back in New York, Ms. Bidwell expressed willingness to relocate to Cambridge to help their relationship grow. He was overjoyed at the idea but told her, quietly, he would want to be “M-A-R-R-I-E-D” before that happened. Given that it took a year for him to ask her out, she did not expect a proposal any time soon.

Mr. Caws was preparing once again to head back to England. He did not want to wait this time. Two days later, after securing her mother’s blessing, he asked Ms. Bidwell to meet him after work at Black Mountain Winehouse. They had dinner and adjourned, as usual, to the Adirondack chairs, even though the temperature hovered in the 20s. She was stunned when he quickly dropped to one knee.

“I feel so present with her,” he said. “I’m always interested. There’s always more to learn. It just makes everything brighter. You already think the world’s in color, and then it’s really in color. You already think you’re a loving person, and then you feel like your heart doubles in size. If the world seemed full of possibility before, the horizon just moved farther away.”

This time he flew home an engaged man. Though it was a surprise to some in their lives — “A lot of people didn’t even know that I had a boyfriend,” Ms. Bidwell said — they began planning a low-key wedding.

On Aug. 27 Mr. Caws, now 49, and Ms. Bidwell, 42, were married before about 130 friends and family as Ms. de Wilde, who became a Universal Life minister for the occasion, officiated at Saipua, a floral design studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn. During the wedding, Mr. Caws and a friend, Dan Wilson, performed a song, “Rushing,” that they had written. The song, about his working up the nerve to ask her out, appears on Nada Surf’s most recent album, “You Know Who You Are,” which came out in March.

Fabio Roberti, the owner of Earwax Records and a guest at the wedding, saw the connection early on. “She’s a really sweet and intelligent woman,” he said. “And he still has a lot of the charm of a young man who’s wanting to be a rock star, which he is.”

At the reception, Ira Elliot, the drummer of Nada Surf, jokingly said that he worried whether marital happiness would ruin Mr. Caws’s typically melancholic songwriting forever.

The couple will split their time between Cambridge and New York, with Ms. Bidwell staying in Cambridge for their first married months. They plan to alternate at least every month after that.

“One of the great things about having this long-distance relationship at first is we got good at it,” Mr. Caws said. “I wish we didn’t have to get good at it; I wish we didn’t have one. But we’re good at staying really present in each other’s lives when we’re away, which bodes well for a future where we’ll be traveling back and forth. When we have long stretches together, it feels like a special occasion the whole time. I’m banking on that lasting always.”