She arrived in New York on Halloween. Then she met the guy of her dreams

By Francesca Street, CNN

(CNN) — Claire Chabaud-Tropéano was walking through the streets of Brooklyn, New York, wondering if that night was going to change her life forever.

That evening, Parisian Claire felt like she’d stepped into the New York City-based movies she’d grown up with: tree-lined streets, rows of townhouses, fall leaves under her feet, jack-o’-lanterns grinning at her from stoops.

“I remember walking in the streets of New York…and being like, ‘This party could be everything. Maybe it can be a pivot.’ Because I felt so bad in my life,” Claire tells CNN Travel.

“I remember being like, ‘Maybe it’s a moment, you’re in a movie, and something’s going to happen, and everything makes sense, and that’s why it was bad before.’ I’ve got a very, very vivid memory of that.”

It was Halloween 2019. Claire, then in her mid-twenties, had traveled to the US from her home in France “on a whim.” She wanted to be an entrepreneur. Her dream was to live in New York City. But she didn’t have a visa, didn’t have an apartment, and didn’t have the means to make any of that a reality. Unfortunately, the trip to New York had made her ambitions seem further away, rather than closer.

“I was seeing my American dream really fading away,” she says.

Plus, that old adage that “wherever you go, there you are” had never felt more real to Claire. She had to admit to herself that running away to the US was also an attempt to run away from unhappiness back home — and it wasn’t really working.

She had just gone through a breakup, she explains. “I was really at this moment of collapsing. I actually cried a lot.”

She debated cutting her losses and returning to Paris, but a New York-based friend persuaded Claire to stay in the city a little longer. Claire had met this friend, who was an entrepreneur, on vacation in Costa Rica. The friend understood the frustrations and ups and downs of building a business — and figured that Claire needed to let off some steam, to have some fun.

“She was like, ‘Look, it’s my birthday this weekend. Just stay for my birthday. And then it’s Halloween next week. So just stay for those two parties, and after, you can go. In the meantime, I’ll host you.’”

The friend’s birthday party was fun. Claire started to feel a little better. And then came the Halloween party, hosted by a couple who were friends with Claire’s friend and worked in the tech world. They were very successful and lived in a beautiful Brooklyn brownstone. Claire’s friend promised the party would be one to remember. Claire allowed herself to get excited.

“Halloween is my favorite party, event, celebration since I was a kid,” says Claire.

She was looking forward to spending the holiday in the US. She knew Americans went all out for Halloween.

“So when my friend told me, ‘Okay, stay for this party, I started to get excited about my outfit.’”

Claire had a vision: She was going to dress as a galaxy, embodying a system of stars.

“I had bought a black cat suit, and I sewed on it fairy lights that were blue, pink and white. So in the dark, you would just see my fairy lights moving.”

When Claire arrived at the address — her fairy lights twinkling — and entered the beautiful 1800s townhouse, the interior took her breath away.

“All the rooms had a kind of incredible setup and decorations… everything was a kind of attraction. There was a room with different light systems, a room where there was a magic carpet…”

Claire was there early, but the building was already full of other twentysomethings in costumes, drinks in hand.

Claire had entered the party with a bit of a goal: “I need to let go of my ex. Let’s see what’s going on.”

She noticed one guy right away. His costume was undeterminable, to Claire at least — a suit and eyepatch. But despite the unimpressive costume, she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

“I remember seeing him and being like, ‘Whoa. If everyone is as hot tonight, that’s going to be great.’”

More people arrived. The party was in full swing. As Claire walked from room to room, chatting with different people, she kept spotting the guy with an eyepatch in the periphery.

“I kept seeing him and being like, ‘Wow, he’s really cute, and I’m really into him,’” she recalls.

But they never seemed to be close enough to talk. And more and more revellers fell through the door, and the party got busier, spread across multiple floors of the townhouse. Claire lost track of the eyepatch guy. And then she ended up on the roof of the building, trapped in a conversation in which she had no interest.

“I was like, ‘I don’t like this conversation. I want to get out of it. And I was really cornered,’” says Claire. “I remember at my school, they told me, ‘You can always leave a room when you’re stuck.’ And so I remember being like, ‘I’m just going to leave.’

And so she left, even as the person she was talking with tried to keep her locked in conversation.

Feeling proud of herself for this decisiveness, Claire made her way downstairs and entered a big room where music was blaring, lights were flashing and everyone was dancing.

“It was very busy, and I was like, ‘Okay, who do I talk to now, what do I do?’”

Then Claire spotted him: the guy with the eyepatch. He was looking at her.

“And he felt like the most beautiful man on earth.”

Claire felt her heart in her chest. She strode towards him, smiling. He smiled back.

The man with the eyepatch

The man with the eyepatch was David Redd.

In the fall of 2019 David was in his late twenties. An LA-based musician, he’d just finished recording his first full-length album. He felt on the precipice of something special, but uncertain how things were going to pan out.

“It was the first body of work as an artist that I felt really, really proud of. I thought it was gonna launch my career,” David tells CNN Travel today. “I also thought I was gonna fall in love. I had been sort of falling for a friend, and was chasing after something that I knew was wrong.”

That October, David was visiting friends in New York City, where he’d grown up. He was excited to catch up with his old crew. But he had to psyche himself up a bit before the party.

“My friends were hosting a cool Halloween party. I was like, ‘All right, I need an escape. I need something to reset,’” he recalls. “I looked in the mirror, and I was like, ‘Alright, I got this party tonight. Let me just bury everything. Let go, give it up to chance. Stop holding on so tightly to what I expected was going to happen, and just allow whatever happens to arrive… And then she arrived.”

David spotted Claire early on, her fairy lights twinkling different colors. Her face illuminated in the neon light.

“I remember your eyes,” he tells her today. “Your very blue eyes.”

David kept spotting Claire on the other side of rooms. Walking past her on staircases. But they kept just missing each other.

“And then, when we finally actually started talking, I had that feeling: ‘Oh, it’s you,’” he recalls.

When David gazed at Claire, it was like something clicked into place. And then she commented on his costume.

“I was like, ‘Hi. Um, are you at the wrong party because your outfit is not as cool as the other people?’” recalls Claire, laughing.

“No no,” says David today, also laughing. “You said, ‘Your outfit is very lame.’ You were rude, very French.’”

Claire doesn’t deny this. But she recalls the two of them laughing together, right after she insulted the costume.

“He has a very broad smile and laugh. And my thought was, ‘I could watch this laugh all my life.’ I remember very distinctively thinking that and being so crazy to think that — it’s not like ‘I could spend my life with him.’ It’s like… ‘I could watch him laugh all my life.’”

David interrupted Claire’s reverie to ask about her costume.

“And I look at him and say, ‘I’m a galaxy,’” Claire recalls.

“It was a good costume,” says David. “Whereas mine was bought for about $12 on Amazon.com.” David was dressed as villain Number 2 from the Austin Powers film franchise — a series of movies Clare had never seen.

“I was missing the reference,” shrugs Claire.

“I did get compliments earlier in the evening from people that understood the reference,” adds David, laughing.

After their costume comparison, David and Claire continued talking. And they didn’t stop.

“It was this weird chemical thing, like we kept circling each other, and then kind of stuck,” says David. “I imagine kind of molecules or atoms, floating around in space, but there’s a chemical charge there that’s attracting them to each other, and then all of a sudden, as soon as they bump into each other, it just kind of…I mean, we spent the whole rest of the night together.”

“I think it was love at first sight,” says Claire. “When he was in a room, every time, my body stopped.”

There’s a photo taken that night, several hours after Claire and David first met. It was “four in the morning, something like that,” says David. In the picture, the two “look like we’ve known each forever.”

“We’re just kind of lying down on the floor. She’s lying on top of me. We’re talking, and it’s just … there’s an intimacy and ease in the pose that’s remarkable. We are complete strangers. We are total strangers,” says David.

At one point a mutual friend walked past, and slightly tipsily told the two that they “should really meet.”

Claire almost laughed.

“I remember being like, ‘Oh, we’re already in love,’ It was very strong for me,” she says. “Though what was interesting is, actually, at this party, we didn’t kiss. Because I told David, ‘I don’t want to kiss you on the first night, if it’s important.’ And so it was interesting, because we just talked, and we actually fell asleep on a couch.”

The next morning, David walked Claire back to the apartment where she was staying.

“He asked for my number, and I tell him, ‘What if we let destiny do it?’ And he looked at me, said, ‘No, give me your number,’” recalls Claire.

David wasn’t going to let a flight of romantic fancy derail this chance at something real.

“‘I had been waiting for this person to arrive. This was the thing that I was looking for and waiting on … and it wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t, like, everything that I’d had in my mind. But it was very clearly right.”

So Claire gave David her number. He promised to text. They said their goodbyes.

‘I was sure it was real’

A day passed. Then two. Then three. Claire heard nothing from David.

“Three days, no news, and I’m heartbroken,” says Claire.

Claire’s usual modus operandi was to wax lyrical to her friends about her potential love interests. But when pals pressed her for information on the guy from the party, she waved them off.

“I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to jinx it…I want to preserve this.’”

But she was rattled by the lack of communication.

“No news from him. And it was like…’I was sure it was real. What’s up with that?’”

Then, on day four, Claire received an Instagram notification: a follow request and message from David.

“I don’t know if the wrong number was intentional, but just in case it wasn’t… hi, it’s me,” read the note.

Somehow, Claire had given David the wrong number. She was relieved he’d perserved and found her on social media instead. Hearing from him was “awesome.”

They started texting. But David was back in LA. Claire was back in Paris. It wasn’t clear where their messages were going.

“A lot of people, when they have these (long-distance) relationships, they’re in this long, drawn-out text thread that’s going on over the course of, eternity, essentially. And I’m a kind of transactional sort of dude when it comes to text messages,” says David.

Their messages were a little stop-start. But they did stay in contact.

“We texted a little bit back and forth, we called from time to time. We did a couple of FaceTimes.”

Claire was also a little hesitant about their communication.

“The fact is, I broke up with my ex because he moved to New York, because I didn’t want to do Paris-New York,” she says. “And now I’m back in Paris with a guy from LA… I remember at first kind of trying to move away from him and not being able to.”

Claire went to parties and out to bars in Paris and talked to other people, hoping to replicate the chemistry she felt with David closer to home, to no avail.

“Every time I would try to talk to someone, I was like, ‘Oh, but there is not this feeling. There is not this intensity,’” she recalls.

Claire shared her tiny Parisian apartment with her two childhood best friends. One evening, she walked into their shared kitchen and made an announcement.

“I was like, ‘Okay, guys. I think I’m going to invite this American boy to our home.’”

Claire’s friends encouraged the idea. They even said they’d clear out for the weekend so Claire and David could have the apartment to themselves.

That evening, while chatting to David, Claire mentioned — as casually as she could muster — that Paris was “really beautiful at this time of year.”

“You should come,” she said.

David was torn. He wanted to see Claire. But he also felt like it was a “crazy” thing to do. He looked for flights, half-hoping they’d be too expensive to justify.

“But it was back in the days of Norwegian Air. God bless them. There was a $300 flight from Los Angeles to Paris round trip. I was like, ‘Wait a second, I could do that. That’s not too crazy,’” says David.

His finger hovered over the purchase button. David hesitated.

“I called my mom, who is a very risk-averse person. I was like, ‘Is this insane? Should I just fly to Paris to meet a girl I met for 16 hours?’”

David expected his mother to talk him out of it. But she didn’t.

“She was like, ‘Well, you know, worst case, you’ll be in Paris, worst case, you’ll wind up there. That’s never a bad idea.’”

David couldn’t fault this logic. He booked the flight.

A Parisian reunion

The day before David arrived in Paris, Claire couldn’t sleep. She cleaned her apartment top to bottom.

“I remember my roommate being very happy with that. She was like ‘That’s very convenient,’” says Claire, laughing.

But when Claire and David reunited, all these nerves melted away. The chemistry from the Halloween party was just as palpable.

They went out for drinks together, catching up over cocktails. Then they ended up meeting up with all of Claire’s friends. David was in his element.

“I’m an American. I’m an English major. I’m a writer. There’s a lot of Paris that I love and fantasize about that’s been romanticized,” says David. “And so we end up at a drag show in Montmartre with a bunch of friends at a tiny little bar. And I was like, ‘Oh, so it’s real. This is exactly what I would have hoped and it was amazing, and her friends were super-cool, and the night was fun and interesting.’”

David and Claire hadn’t defined the terms of his visit. They hadn’t talked about what their connection might entail. Claire hadn’t told all of her friends about him — one of them even tried to make a move on David, which Claire swiftly blocked. But she didn’t voice her own feelings to David aloud that first day. He didn’t say his thoughts aloud either. But they didn’t leave each other’s side.

“I’m sure we were both feeling it, but neither of us had expressed anything,” David recalls.

Claire attributes this stalemate to their respective attachment styles. She’s “anxious.” He’s “avoidant.”

But David would also get swept up in the romance of the moment. He told Claire he loved her that weekend, even as he swerved her attempts at planning for the future.

On the last day, this culminated in a confrontation.

“The last night … ‘What is this?’ was a big question. I don’t think we had any answers,” says David.

David figured it would all work out if it was supposed to. He left thinking: “We’re going to figure it out.”

“He had a sense of this. I did not,” says Claire. “I was freaking out.”

That was November. In December, the two met in San Francisco. But Claire, unsure where she stood with David, pitched this as a spontaneous trip to visit California-based friends for New Year’s Eve. She thought it went without saying that David would pick her up from the airport. David told himself Claire just happened to be in town.

“And so, I did not pick her up from the airport,” says David. “I’m sure there was stuff in my own psyche that was afraid and unsure and probably trying to sabotage things a little bit, and was, yeah, kind of avoidant of, ‘Okay, what’s happening? What’s the level of intention here? What is the situation? Am I picking her up for another romantic adventure, or am I meeting her at a party that she said she was going to?’ Turns out it was both.”

“So I arrive at the airport and he’s not here,” recalls Claire. “I call a friend, she picks me up, and I felt crazy. I’m like… ‘You cross the world for someone who’s not there.’”

For Claire, the moment highlighted the tensions of meeting someone on vacation. Sure, it’s romantic in the moment. But when do you commit? When do you express your feelings? How do you make it work?

When David suggested they shouldn’t put a label on their connection, Claire was left reeling.

“I was like, ‘If I’m going to take a 12-hour flight, you’re going to put a label on this.”

For David, the risk of losing Claire forever was a wake-up call. He was honest with her.

“I remember saying, ‘I really want this. But I just don’t want to be tethered to my phone. I don’t want to be in a FaceTime relationship. I don’t know what to do. I’m very scared of this.’”

Claire understood his fears. They weren’t about her. They were about the realities of committing to someone who lived on another continent, over 5,000 miles away. It was a fear she shared.

But she noted that even when he seemed to be wavering, David didn’t disappear on her.

“He always stayed in a fight, he was always there,” she says.

David felt the significance of this too.

“Even if we were struggling to figure out the structure of the relationship or how we were going to make this work, or if I was a little bit avoidant in terms of how I was going to state my commitment… I think we were both really forward with our feelings and our emotions about it, and committed in terms of how strong it felt, and committed to whatever it is we’re going to figure this out together,” he says.

With that sentiment in mind, Claire and David decided to jump in and commit to a relationship. It was January 2020.

For the next couple of months, things felt surprisingly easy.

“In February, we met in London, and then in March, we met up back again in New York, and she met my whole family,” says David. “I released the first song from my debut album. I played a sold-out show in New York City. It was this perfect weekend again, everything was fitting really well.”

Post-gig, Claire and David spent a cozy Sunday together, planning out the rest of the year — alternating meet-ups in Paris and LA. It felt doable.

“And that’s when we got an email from the French government saying that she was being repatriated to France. There was a national emergency. You needed to get on the next plane now… And then we were quarantined apart for the next four months.”

Long-distance uncertainties

During those early months of the pandemic, David quickly realized his fears of a relationship confined solely to FaceTime had come true.

But rather than stressing him out, long calls with Claire kept him sane in a stressful, uncertain time.

“There was a pretty easy cadence where there was time to just sit and talk,” he says. “That’s where I think a lot of our relationship kind of fully bloomed. We knew it was there, but we got to see each other’s vulnerabilities more. We got to see each other in not the best places.”

They played board games on the internet. They went to Zoom dance parties. David wrote love poetry and read it to Claire over video call, “a little drunk.”

Meanwhile, both Claire and David tracked their respective country’s border rules, desperately hoping they might be able to reunite. By the summer of 2020, a plan had formed: David would fly to London, quarantine there, and then catch a train to France to be with Claire, who, by then, was living with her grandparents in the south of the country.

It was more of a Covid-era border loophole than it was a legally sanctioned move. When David arrived at Heathrow, UK border officials gave him “a hard time.”

“I eventually was like, ‘Look, I’m meeting my girlfriend. She’s from France. I have a negative Covid test. I am not trying to stay in the country too long. I just need to be here for two weeks, and then I’m leaving,’” he says. “And they let me in.”

Two weeks later, David moved into Claire’s grandparents home in the south of France. Both Claire and David were overwhelmed with a feeling of relief.

“Getting back to be in the same place as each other, it just felt like ‘All right, now our life begins,’” recalls David.

But the situation wasn’t something they’d ever expected — a twentysomething couple living with an eighty-something couple in a pandemic.

“And my grandparents don’t believe in a foreign language,” says Claire.

The older couple didn’t speak English and refused to entertain the idea that David didn’t understand their French. Still, despite the language barrier, Claire’s grandparents warmed to their American visitor.

“My grandpa was very solitary, and yet my grandpa loved David from day one,” says Claire. “My grandpa just sat David with a glass of wine and started to tell him war stories.”

“I understood just enough to know when to laugh,” says David.

Over the next few months, David picked up more French. David and Claire spent cozy afternoons together, and long evenings cooking and sharing bottles of wine with Claire’s grandparents. It was a surreal, but special time.

“We went from ‘we meet in the best places in the world’ to ‘we quarantine for three months with my grandparents in France,’” says Claire. “But it was so special. My grandpa passed away earlier this year, and what was amazing is he was so close to David, because we had these few months together that were so meaningful.’”

But after three months in France, David had to return to the US. EU nationals still couldn’t visit the US, and the couple’s next steps were unclear.

Eventually — after arguing with border agents and searching for answers online — David and Claire went to Mexico together, planning to spend two weeks in Mexico City before traveling to the US, another Covid-era border loophole.

After abandoning a windowless Airbnb for a room in a shared apartment, the two spent an amazing two weeks hiking and exploring the city and befriending the owner and other people in their vacation rental — who they remain friends with to this day.

“They were locals,” says Claire. “Our friend, Dani had just come back from traveling. She had been repatriated back to Mexico. We stayed there for a couple of weeks. We went camping with her and became good friends and just fell in love with Mexico City…Another one of those crazy stories where, how did it work out like this?”

From there, the two went to the US, where Claire stayed for three months. In 2021, the couple were separated for several months again.

Eventually, the pandemic started to wane and travel restrictions started to loosen, and reuniting became easier.

‘Out of our comfort zones’

For Claire and David, these experiences of separation and hard-fought reunion crystallized their certainty in each other and in their relationship.

“We were out of our comfort zones the whole time,” says David. “They say traveling is a great way to get to know if you’re compatible with your partner. Well, we did a lot of that very early on, in difficult circumstances, difficult and stressful.”

This period also crystallized their plans for the future. Claire was “typically French” in not thinking marriage was essential when choosing a life partner. And David had always disliked the “crazy expectations” of the American “wedding industry.”

“But, with all of the travel restrictions, with all of the craziness going on, I think it made it clear that legal protection here might be valuable,” says David. “Which is not the most romantic thing in the world, but I think we were able to then find the way to make it romantic, and find a way to make it feel like it was us.”

And so in the summer of 2022, David and Claire got married in the south of France in the village of Tourrettes-sur-Loup where Claire grew up. Afterwards, the wedding party headed to nearby Juan-les-Pins, by the coast.

“It was very cute. I love our wedding. It was very simple. It was on a Tuesday … it was very hot. We had the marriage at a city hall, and after dinner on a beach, on the sand,” says Claire.

In the planning period, Claire realized the idea of feeling her “feet in the sand” on her wedding day was the only aspect of the day she felt strongly about.

But in the moment, both Claire and David surprised each other with how emotional they felt about getting married and about its significance.

They also loved having the opportunity to bring their families together for the first time. There were plenty of comical French/American misunderstandings. David’s grandmother made a memorable speech.

“She had a bad habit of doing, like, long rhyming couplet kind of things,” says David. “I was like, ‘Please don’t do one of those.’ And it was great. We got a two line speech and a Mic drop.”

Becoming a team

After their wedding, David and Claire settled in LA. This was a pretty easy decision — a fulfillment of Claire’s longheld dream of living in the US.

“I’ve been obsessed with the US since I’m a kid. I wanted to work here,” she explains.

By then, it was 2023. The couple regularly returned to France to see Claire’s grandparents. They put down roots together in Los Angeles. They finally shook off their fears of being separated by borders, relieved that no matter what happened, they’d be together.

“Our wedding secured us the certainty that we could not be separated,” says Claire.

All the energy they’d spent on traveling, on border-navigating, could now be focused on their relationship, on their careers, on their life in Los Angeles, where they still live today.

While the couple are happy in LA, they’re not sure if they’ll be there forever. They’re considering a potential move to London to be closer to France and spend more time with Claire’s family. It helps that David’s now fluent in French.

“People always say, ‘That’s so cute. You learned French for your wife.’ I’m like, ‘No, I learned French for me. I learned French to feel like I could truly immerse myself in the culture in France. I learned French so that I could communicate with her family and get to know her family,” he says.

David also adds, laughing, that he learned French so the couple’s future kids won’t be about to talk about him “behind my back.”

“I was excited about having a secret language with my kids,” jokes Claire.

For now, the couple are concentrating on life in the US, where Claire is working hard on her start-up — developing “smart bras” that track hormones and health. Meanwhile, David is focused on his music.

Earlier in October, he released a song he describes as being “about falling in love while the world fell apart, finding happiness in the craziness.” The song, “Slowly Straight to You” is about Claire, of course.

Both Claire and David relish the support and stability they offer each other in non-stable careers. With David by her side, Claire says life feels “like a canvas.” The opportunities feel endless.

David echoes this:

“The fact that we have this relationship even on those days where we’re failing everything, where dreams aren’t coming true — which happens in this life — we know that we have this thing that we built and that feels really sturdy.”

Feeling grateful

This year marks six years since Claire wandered the streets of Brooklyn, wondering if a Halloween party would change her life.

The end of October remains a special time for Claire and David. They always take a moment to reflect on their life together when Halloween rolls around. The two also usually hunt out a slice of fall around this time of year, as they’re both from places where “autumn is a thing, versus in Los Angeles, where it’s not,” says David.

“Somewhere that feels like there’s trees and there’s leaves changing, and there’s a sense of escape and just kind of grounding ourselves in nature a little bit. We do that pretty much every year, around our anniversary — and we try to find a good Halloween party.”

Claire’s Halloween costume prowess has also rubbed off on David.

“We both dressed up a couple years ago as different versions of David Bowie. So that was a good one,” recalls David.

Today, when Claire reflects on that New York Halloween party and meeting David, she says her overwhelming feeling is gratitude.

“So grateful,” she emphasizes. “He was everything I hoped I could meet someday, but I thought I couldn’t deserve it. When I met David, I was like, ‘He’s so kind. I am so attracted to him. He’s so interesting. He understands me.’”

As for David, he says reflecting on meeting Claire and building a life together also keeps him “hopeful” about life more broadly.

“It’s a good reminder to enjoy the ride a little bit,” says David. “The ups and downs. There’s going to be trouble, there’s going to be perfect moments, there’s going to be everything in between. But have some faith, trust that you’re getting where you’re going, even if it’s agonizing along the way. The agonizing is probably you just being impatient, probably you just stressing the ride a little bit too much.

“If you’re clear in what you want and stick to what you believe in, I do have faith that you’ll get where you’re going. Meeting Claire really showed me that, and it’s restored that faith.”

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