One day in 2016, the Republican minority leader in the Connecticut House of Representatives, Themis Klarides, received an email that raised an eyebrow. After she read it, she strode into her chief of staff’s office and held up her phone.
“What does this mean to you?” Ms. Klarides recalled asking.
The message in her palm was from a potential political rival. Most of it was unremarkable — she and the sender, a Republican in the private sector, were each exploring the idea of running for governor of Connecticut. They had agreed that it would be helpful to meet, and were coordinating a time to have dinner. It was the end of the email that gave Ms. Klarides pause.
“He goes, ‘I look forward to spending quality time with you,’” Ms. Klarides said. “Who says that? That’s a weird thing to say, right?”
“It is kind of weird,” she recalled being advised.
The sender of the email, Gregory Brian Butler, insists that “quality time” wasn’t meant to telegraph intimate intentions. He said that the phrase was simply part of his lexicon. But in retrospect, it’s hard not to read it as an indicator that his and Ms. Klarides’s relationship had potential beyond the professional.
Months earlier, a mutual political consultant had recommended that Ms. Klarides meet Mr. Butler, the executive vice president and general counsel of Eversource Energy in Hartford, Conn.
“She believed that we were the two strongest candidates,” Ms. Klarides said, “so if it ends up that we both run and we go and beat each other up — that’s not good for any of us.”
Schedules didn’t align. Weeks became months. And then one Friday night at a Holiday Inn ballroom in Norwich, Conn., Ms. Klarides and Mr. Butler finally crossed paths.
“It was your typical political dinner,” Ms. Klarides said.
They got to talking, and kept talking.
“We talked for a number of minutes, and in fact to the point of some consternation on the part of my political team, who was trying to get me to work the room,” Mr. Butler said. “I had no interest in talking to anybody else other than Themis.”
Added Ms. Klarides: “There was something there. It was one of those things though that you don’t know what that is.”
It was after this first meeting that Mr. Butler sent the “quality time” email. While Ms. Klarides read a certain level of intimacy into his message, at the time Mr. Butler was nervous about the idea of romance: He had lost his wife, the Rev. Nancy Jane Carroll Butler, to A.L.S. months before.
“It had been a very difficult, very dark time,” he said.
When he and Ms. Klarides finally met for dinner, they were there to talk business. But by dessert, the meeting felt more like a date. The next morning, Mr. Butler left for a business trip that lasted several days. He and Ms. Klarides texted nonstop.
“By the time I got back to Connecticut three or four days later, I felt like I had been on a half a dozen dates with her already,” he said.
Neither of them ultimately ran for governor in 2018. But their relationship endured, and Mr. Butler proposed in January of this year. Ms. Klarides, 55, and Mr. Butler, 62, were married Sept. 20 at St. Barbara Greek Orthodox Church in Orange, Conn. The Rev. Peter J. Orfanakos, a Greek Orthodox priest, performed the ceremony.
The couple’s life together involves a lot of running around. “Anybody in politics has the craziest lifestyle around,” Ms. Klarides said. “Your schedule isn’t your own.”
Mr. Butler likes to joke that he’s become Ms. Klarides’s driver. He also credits their relationship with helping him through tragedy.
“I didn’t quite realize how big a black hole I was in — in terms of emotions — in that time period,” Mr. Butler said. “Meeting Themis, it almost felt like the sun came back out again, and the world seemed beautiful again and I could smile again. So in a lot of ways it kind of brought me back to life. She kind of brought me back to life.”
