OnLove: The wedding of Erica Stevens and Martin Hewett
Hewett, naturally, was frustrated.
The two met the previous spring as interns for the same federal judge. Both were in their second year of law school — she was at Catholic University, he was at Georgetown — and several times a week they sat at opposite ends of a conference table, working on their laptops. When the two discovered they’d both be in New York for the summer, they exchanged numbers and promised to meet up.
“He’s really funny and very, very smart. .?.?. So I was interested in hanging out with him more,” she says. “But it was all platonic — I mean, from my end.”
When a Yankees game they’d planned on seeing was rained out, the pair ended up spending the evening in a dive bar, laughing easily and listening to live music. They were together frequently after that, with Hewett growing increasingly sure that the connection was romantic.
There were signals, he says: “We were going to dinner together. And I was paying for it. Things like that.” They even kissed once, but it was cocktail-fueled courage that propelled him to go for it.
Stevens was also falling for Hewett but had hesitations. She was 28 at the time. He was 23. “I was like, ‘Oh, I can’t date him. He’s too young for me,’?” she recalls. “?‘He’s not mature enough.’?”
By August, Hewett was fed up with the lack of progress. When Stevens returned to Washington, a few weeks before he was scheduled to go back, he stopped calling her.
“I shut it down,” he says, smiling. “And that worked perfectly. It was brilliant.”
Stevens reached out to Hewett, asking to get together when he got back. “I really liked him,” she recalls. “And I missed him!”
They began dating immediately, and this time they were on the same page. They supported each other through school and intense preparations for the bar exam.
“We went through so much stuff, but we still had a great time together,” she says. The two discovered they had the same values, the same quick wit, analytical intelligence, strong work ethic and penchant for good times. “We just fit.”
But in October 2007, he was scheduled to start a job at a firm in New York, and the only jobs she could find were in D.C. Stevens had been in long-distance relationships before and didn’t want to do it again, especially if there was no end date in sight. So when he left, she cut it off.
Still, they talked on the phone almost nightly, though Hewett wouldn’t entertain the idea of a quick visit. “I was interested in us getting back together,” he explains. “And I wasn’t real keen on just a fleeting weekend.”
But when he was invited to a wedding in Richmond the following April, he asked her to be his date. Stevens realized then that she wanted to give the relationship another chance. “I was like, ‘This is kind of stupid. Maybe we should try.’?”
She continued to interview for jobs in New York, but as soon as she landed one, Hewett found out that he had been selected for not one but two year-long, back-to-back clerkships — both in Philadelphia.
