#romantic-relationship

#romantic-relationship

Kim (not her real name) and I bonded when our sons played on the same travel basketball team. For years, we spent weekend after weekend together in loud, testosterone-filled gyms, rife with the smell of boy sweat and breakfast sandwiches. We always sat in the same place on the unforgiving bleachers, midway up in the center, and picked up our conversation from where we left off at the previous practice or game.

Simon and I couldn't be more different. When we met, I was 38, he was 54, and his unabashed zest for life broke through my complicated caution. I knew I was in love when, after a lazy summer evening together, I lay on the stone beside a Trafalgar Square fountain and felt joy seep through my skin. I moved in with him, his rural 15th-century cottage becoming our home, workplace (me in medicine, he in shipping), and where I discovered previously unknown contentment.

Over the course of the next few days, we laid ourselves bare. What we found were two ambitious people on the verge of new beginnings - I was about to publish my first book, and he was starting a new business - who were being held back by unsupportive partners, toxic friends and an overwhelming sense of duty to how life "should" be lived.

Some testimony on Day 3 of the removal hearing for San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus contradicts her claims that she had no romantic relationship with the man she hired as her chief of staff. Sheriff Corpus has called Victor Aenlle (pronounced ay-en-jay) a "colleague, a trusted confidante, and a friend," but she has spent the last nine months denying that she and Aenlle had any sort of romantic relationship. The question of whether the two were romantically involved lies at the center of the battle over Corpus's possible removal from office she stands accused of conflict of interest in the hiring of Aenlle as her chief of staff, in addition to other accusations of retaliation and inappropriate conduct.