In 2016, he rented a place down the street. They still live apart a few days a week — Ms. Winter is often in the cottage, and Mr. Anderson lives primarily near Round Top, where he bought a 20-acre horse farm in 2017. “The LAT scenario is a dreamy system that offers us flexibility,” Ms. Winter said of their living-apart-together arrangement.
Mr. Anderson, the reformed gambler, is not completely risk averse. In July 2016, on a vacation to Italy, he asked her to marry him at a romantic cafe in Assisi. Her response was essentially, “Yes, but not now.” For him, marriage felt like an important threshold for them to step across. But for her, the prospect jogged feelings of wariness. “I knew I wanted a partner, but I didn’t know about marriage,” she said. “Chris had to redefine it for me, and he gave me a lot of space to explore that. He said, ‘We don’t have to have rigid roles.’”
Six years later, she called him with a proposal of her own. In the fall of 2022, Mr. Anderson and Ms. Winter joined St. Cecilia’s Episcopal Church in Round Top. A priest there, the Rev. William Miller, asked them to lead a course on healthy relationships for couples. “It was about getting to know all the areas in marriage that were crucial for couples to get past,” Ms. Winter said. Being Mr. Anderson’s co-facilitator came with a sense of irony. “I looked at all these other couples, and they were married and we were not, and I thought, something’s wrong with this picture.”
On Nov. 1, 2022, she downloaded a marriage application from the Travis County website. “I filled it out with the clear intention of being married that day,” she said, in the local courthouse. Mr. Anderson had to convince her to wait until their families, including their children and six grandchildren, could gather in Texas.
