It didn’t take endless quarantining with my spouse during the COVID-19 pandemic to end my marriage of over two decades. By the summer of 2019, menopause — and the extra-added “bonus” of frontal fibrosing alopecia that it awakened — was pummeling me physically and mentally to the extent that I no longer had the capacity to function inside the dysfunction of my life.

The relief that came with the decision to finally let go was completely dwarfed by the immense pain of severing a family in two. I cried as I packed. I cried as I unpacked. I was rolling endlessly in a dark wave that would not stop; my feet could not tell sand from sky. Once I managed to break the surface, I reached out.

I called Tish, Diane and Michelle, three smart, strong, nurturing women who’d been through and survived divorce. I also called my brother, Dan, and my friends Doug and Steve, three kind, creative, funny men who always “got” me.

As for Steve, we met in the spring of 1984 when he auditioned to be the drummer for the Secrets, the band Dan, Doug and I had started the year before. In our small-town high school of fewer than 400 students, he had flown completely under my radar, as he was two years younger, and he joined marching band the year after I’d ditched my baritone horn for a microphone and Pat Benatar tights. Steve aced the audition, and the four of us clicked immediately over our shared love of the Pretenders and all things Monty Python. By mid-June, the Secrets were playing local bars and biker parties in the middle of nowhere, and I was head over heels in love with the drummer.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with a boy from my hometown.

I had spent my whole life dying to get out of Middlebourne, W.Va., and had been champing at the bit to leave for college, but by late August, that no longer meant freedom; it meant that I’d have to leave Steve behind. I told myself we’d defy the odds and make it work. He was my soul mate. But we were just kids, and there was no internet, no cellphones with unlimited text and calling. By February 1985, the divide was too great. In a moment of loneliness, I cheated on him. It was over, and I was firmly told to take my place in the friend zone.

I spent the following year flailing and failing in college before making the bold, half-baked decision to drop out of the West Virginia University theater program and move to Los Angeles, a place I’d never been, to pursue a singing career. When Steve found out that I was moving across the country, he softened his friend-zone stance and told me he loved me. On July 13, 1986, he went with my parents to Pittsburgh International Airport to see me off.

For the next 33 years, we would come together and drift apart — sometimes as lovers but mostly as friends. During a visit to my Hollywood apartment in 1988, when he was still in college and the timing was still wrong, I told him, “Who knows. Maybe in 30 years, I’ll come back and get you.”

In November 2019, Steve came to visit me for a long weekend.

I picked him up at Los Angeles International Airport and took him straight to Zuma Beach for a picnic, where we watched dolphins jumping in the waves while the seagulls stole our potato chips. The following day, we cozied up for an afternoon of wine and cheese at Cornell Wine Co. in Old Agoura, then made our way over Topanga Canyon for dinner at Canyon Bistro & Wine Bar.

The night before he flew home, we watched the sun set from our table by the lake at Zin Bistro Americana in Westlake Village. I felt giddy, excited, seen, understood and appreciated in a way I hadn’t felt in a very long time. While it was tempting to jump right in with both feet, we decided to date long distance and take things slowly.

On March 26, 2020, while Steve was still recovering from being profoundly ill with COVID, I arrived at his doorstep at 6 a.m. and proclaimed, “I’m not leaving here without you.”

Two weeks later, after packing most of his belongings into U-Haul shipping crates, we left Parkersburg, W.Va., in Steve’s red Volkswagen Golf with two suitcases, one Treeing Walker Coonhound and one Aussie/Chow mix. I-40 West was practically empty; just us and the occasional car or Amazon truck.

We arrived in California on Easter Sunday and joined the rest of the world in quarantine, not knowing how it would affect our work and financial future. We took a lot of long walks to help deal with the stress of the not knowing, but the magic panacea for me came the day Steve’s Harley-Davidson arrived in one of the crates.

We cruised up and down PCH, and roared our way up and over Mulholland Highway, Stunt Road, Malibu Canyon and Decker Canyon, stopping along the way to stretch our legs, feel the sea spray on our faces and take in views from the valleys to the coastline. We were surrounded by so much beauty; it was almost impossible to let trepidation win.

On one particularly memorable ride on Mulholland Highway between Kanan Road and SR 23 near Saddle Rock, we came around a bend and — bam! — right in front of me was the greenest mountain range I’d ever seen in California, gleaming spectacularly in the sunlight. As I inhaled its gorgeousness and exhaled my stress, I thought, “I can’t believe I get to see this. I can’t believe I get to do this. I can’t believe I get to be with Steve.”

In September 2024, I got to marry Steve.

As my brother, Dan, said at the reception, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

The author lives in the suburbs of Los Angeles with her husband, Steve, and their dogs, Coco Puff and Kira.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

There has always been a metaphorical parallel between The Bear, the television show, and The Bear, the fictional restaurant on the television show. Even as Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) transformed the Italian beef joint into the fancy restaurant of their dreams and wished for a Michelin star, there were undoubtedly locals who thought, “This is great and all, and I’m sure the food is good, but … I liked the beef sandwiches.” There’s still a window at The Bear to get them, but the focus is certainly elsewhere.

When it started, The Bear was mostly about the work that took place in the kitchen. The stresses of too many orders, territoriality from Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), the arrival of Sydney, and the tightly wound but undeniably talented Carmy, making everybody both extremely stressed and significantly better. Over time, it shifted and grew, putting together beloved departure episodes like “Fishes” in Season 2, which introduced a boatload of guest stars for a flashback story of a disastrous family dinner before Mikey (Jon Bernthal) died. It spent time with Sydney’s family, it explored the way Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) and Mikey originally met, it followed Marcus (Lionel Boyce) to Copenhagen, and it went with Richie to work for Andrea (Olivia Colman). All these episodes were excellent. And there was still a kitchen. But the focus seemed to be elsewhere.

At times, the show seemed to have disappeared up its own nose, to the point where you weren’t watching the show The Bear as much as you were watching the phenomenon The Bear. There were too many real-life chef cameos, until it seemed like those chefs were checking a box on a list of “things all the cool kids do.” There were too many other cameos, culminating in a rare miss from the reliably charismatic John Cena. The show placed a lot of narrative weight on Carmy’s love interest, Claire (Molly Gordon) — weight that the underwritten character couldn’t support. But even if every experiment and every diversion had worked, viewers couldn’t be blamed for missing the close focus on the kitchen and the camaraderie — for thinking, “This is all really special, but I do miss the beef sandwiches.”

The fifth and final season dispenses with the departure episodes, and it mostly dispenses with cameos. It all takes place on one day, just after Carmy tells Richie and Sydney that he wants to step back from the restaurant and give it to them and Sugar (Abby Elliott) to run, and it mostly takes place right there at The Bear. Now that the clock set by Jimmy (Oliver Platt) has run out, his money has run out as well, and a series of cascading disasters puts Sydney, Carmy and Richie behind the 8-ball from very early in the day, not least because of the tension hanging over all three of them as they prepare to tell the staff about Carmy’s decision to leave.

Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas).

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We spend this day mostly with the people we know best: our three leads, along with Sugar, Tina, Marcus, and the rest of the staff — including Luca (Will Poulter), who has stayed around to keep working with Marcus. Jimmy is running around with Computer (Brian Koppelman) and a young apprentice of his named Cheese (Elsie Fisher of Eighth Grade), trying to figure out what to do about his finances since it is Jimmy, and not just the restaurant, who’s out of money.

A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: First a confession: I have never watched a WWE match in its entirety. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the athleticism and the performance, it’s just not my thing. But there is something about John Cena I’ve never been able to shake.

Yes, he is a wrestling legend, but he has built a career as an entertainer that transcends the ring. The first time I saw him lead a cast was the 2019 family movie “Playing with Fire” and his rapport with kids in that film didn’t seem like acting at all. The man contains multitudes!

He co-stars with Eric Andre in his newest film, “Little Brother.”