My relationship to my husband’s watch journey is not unlike many aspects of our marriage. A recurring scenario: I encourage him to take up an interest that I think we’ll enjoy together—or, in some cases, assume will be to my advantage—only to discover that I have created a new obsession from which he cannot be freed. He lives life at two speeds: zero or 100. Don’t get me wrong. I love this about him. His joie de vivre is infectious to all who know him, but sometimes I feel like Sylvester the Cat chasing Speedy Gonzales.
When we first met, he found it charming that I wrote about the niche world of watches. He, however, didn’t wear one. His explanation should have been my first warning sign. Early on, he told me he once owned a TAG Heuer he had received from his parents as a high-school graduation gift. It accompanied him to Boston during his university years at Berklee College of Music, where he lived in a house he and his friends affectionately dubbed the Rage Cage. Unsurprisingly, it disappeared during a rager.
Although those years were ostensibly behind him, I wasn’t rushing to encourage another mechanical-timekeeper acquisition. For much of our early dating days, he wore an Apple Watch. Easy enough. This also happened to coincide with the pandemic, which, in our case, served as a relationship accelerator. Covid hit just three months after we began seeing each other, and, before either of us had time to process what was happening, we were living together.
Thrown off by this wrench in our regular lives, he began complaining about not sleeping well. I suggested he track his patterns by wearing the watch to bed. In hindsight, this was a terrible idea. Consumed by the sleep app’s feedback loop, he would obsess over every night’s data. I started to wonder if he would even feel tired if the app hadn’t informed him his sleep was disrupted. The watch wasn’t measuring anxiety; it was manufacturing it. This tiny tracker began to haunt me. Fortunately, amid the Groundhog Day monotony of Covid, he lost the watch during an ill-advised swan dive from a dock into a lake. I was thrilled.
Fast-forward to 2021, and we were preparing to walk down the aisle. For better or for worse, as they say! Against my better judgment, I bought him a vintage Patek Philippe Calatrava Ref. 5022G, mercifully sourced at an excellent price from Eric Wind of Wind Vintage, as a wedding gift. He happily wore it down the aisle, but in anticipation of potential horrors, I banished it to the safe. The upside? He still has it.
As our first wedding anniversary approached, I attended a watch fair in New York where I spied Eric Wind from across the room, surrounded by a sea of collectors. I marched up to see what he had brought. He pulled out a rare vintage Rolex Oyster Ref. 6424 from the ’50s on a leather strap with what seemed like a fairly reasonable price tag. It was nice, but it wasn’t a Patek. In yet another moment of insanity, I decided to purchase it as an anniversary gift for my husband, reasoning that I could give him a watch he could actually wear without my guarding it like hired security.
I gave it to him that evening at his mother’s house in Connecticut. He was ecstatic. For just one day.
Joy was swiftly replaced by chaos. Near midnight the following day, I was in bed reading when my husband walked in and quietly sat beside me. I immediately suspected something was up. He had the expression of a man about to confess a felony. “I’ve lost the watch,” he told me, solemnly. “I feel sick.” I simply sighed—not because I was calm, but because the alternatives were screaming or hyperventilating. Secretly, I was relieved that I wasn’t the one who lost it. I am not immune to losing tiny treasures; this time my flaws were outshone.
Over the following days, he filed a report with the M.T.A., had his mother dig through her trash and turn her house upside down, and searched every corner of our apartment. Mortified, I resigned myself to calling Eric to see whether he had a copy of the paperwork so we could file a police report. I’m pretty certain we are the first clients in Wind Vintage history to purchase and lose a watch within 24 hours.
Eric was naturally shocked. He followed up later in the week: “Did it show up? I am sick to my stomach about it.” The sentiment was surely shared by all involved parties. At that point, there were at least four people losing sleep over one Rolex.
Three anguishing months later, the watch resurfaced just as dramatically as it disappeared. It made a grand reentrance into our lives by flying out of my husband’s squash shoe like a projectile. When I tell him I’m writing this story, he laughs, recalling the Rolex’s rather unsexy reappearance. “I was getting fitted for orthotics, and it flew out of my shoe across the room and hit the floor!” he exclaims. I don’t think this is what Rolex has in mind when it advertises its client experience.
As is often the case in marriage, there’s rarely just one guilty party. Incredibly, we both forgot that we had agreed he would put the watch in his sneaker inside his gym bag. He had been playing weekly, so he proposed storing it there because he thought he wouldn’t misplace it. Incomprehensibly, I agreed to this. (I know, I should be committed.) But why he did not take out the shoes for some 90 days afterward is still a bit of a mystery to us both.
If the Rolex ever finds its way into the hands of our future children, they’ll know it survived marriage, panic, an M.T.A. investigation, and three months inside a squash shoe. Whether I’ll ever buy my husband another watch, however, remains very much an open question.
As it turns out, I haven’t had to. During a winter getaway to Aspen, while I was struggling halfway down Ajax, he rang to tell me he had just picked up not one, but two watches from Oliver Smith at the base of the mountain.
The good news and the bad news? I think we’re in both marriage and watch collecting for life.
