This story is part of GQ’s Modern Lovers issue.
“This is a good story,” Colman Domingo says. It's a story about love, luck, and stars aligning on the internet.
In 2005, Colman had just walked into his local Walgreens in Berkeley, California, in search of a Queen Helene mud mask. Then a struggling actor—Colman has since gone on to appear on Fear the Walking Dead and lit up Twitter with his star turn on Euphoria—he'd taken on a brutal role in a macabre play about the Jonestown Massacre and needed a moment to expel the toxins and treat himself.
That's when he saw Raúl: long dark hair, a lip piercing, and “these eyes,” Colman recalls over Zoom, like he's lost in them all over again, while Raúl looks down and grins.
At the store, Colman was on a call with a friend on his Motorola Razr when he suddenly realized he needed to hang up. Colman and Raúl locked gazes. Raúl was arm in arm with an irritated woman who was dragging him out of the Walgreens. Colman tried to wave him back but was unsuccessful.
Dazed by the man he'd just seen, Colman wandered off and somehow ended up aimlessly puttering around the aisles of a nearby Blockbuster. He ambled back onto the street, brimming with the sort of hope you feel when destiny's just knocked on your door. “I just felt something,” Colman says.
Cupid's arrow was slightly off target that day. See, Raúl and his friend were en route to a party, and they got horribly lost. So they stopped by Walgreens to get an “I'm sorry I'm late” chocolate bar. At the party, Raúl downed Chardonnay to try to forget the face he'd just seen.
The day after their drugstore encounter, Raúl fired up Craigslist and drafted a post in the Missed Connections section that began “I saw you outside of Walgreens in Berkeley…” A couple of days later, on the other side of the bay, Colman was browsing Craigslist in search of a used iPod Touch and, ever the hopeless romantic, clicked over to Missed Connections. “I literally jumped out of my chair when I saw the post,” Colman says.
Raúl returned home from work that day, opened his clunky laptop, and dialed in to the internet to check his Yahoo account. There was an email waiting for him that went “To the sweet angel with the most arresting eyes…”
Their first official date was at a little bar in San Francisco, where they asked each other questions “Barbara Walters-style,” Colman says, and then they spent the night together after Raúl insisted. Colman leaned over when he thought Raúl was sleeping and whispered, “I think I love you.”
Just as quickly, they became inextricably part of each other's lives. Raúl showed up to nearly every one of Colman's performances in the Jonestown play with a bouquet of white roses. In a way, watching Colman act was a lens for Raúl to divine what he could about the man he loved. “I feel like I needed to understand everything that you are,” Raúl explains now as Colman wears a small, pursed smile. Their first summer together, they moved to Juneau, Alaska, where Colman got an acting gig. Raúl took a job as an assistant costume designer on the shoot so he could go too. When they moved down to New York in November, Raúl proposed.
It's difficult to imagine the serendipity of Colman and Raúl's fairy tale happening today, during an era when we can optimize love right out of our lives. If Colman had seen Raúl, who's 11 years younger, on a dating app, he says, he likely would have swiped right past him. “It is magical,” Colman says, “the imperfections or the off-roading and things like that. It's supposed to be like this. You never know what you're supposed to get.”
Nine years after they first met outside that California Walgreens, Colman and Raúl were married in a small, casual ceremony disguised as a house party. They invited 25 people over and greeted each one by saying, “Welcome to our wedding.” Colman wore a Hawaiian shirt; they danced until four in the morning. They are still living happily ever after when I talk to them in December. Behind them, just as it's been since the beginning, is a bouquet of white roses.
Cam Wolf is a GQ staff writer.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2021 issue with the title "A Cupid's Tale, With A Craigslist Twist."