Caryn and Mitchell's first date was a boating outing with friends in 1995. Photo / Desiree Rios for The Washington Post
The forced proximity of lockdown led to a lot of breakups. But it reminded this duo why they chose each other in the first place.
Surrounded by family on a beach in Carlsbad, California, one evening in August, Mitchell Fonberg got down on bended knee.
“It’s not often you get a second chance at love,” he told Caryn Fonberg as the sun set over the Pacific Ocean behind them. “You’re the best person in the whole world, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
It wasn’t the first time Mitchell had asked Caryn to tie the knot. In December 1995, he hid a ring in a gift-filled bag at a Hanukkah celebration. They married the following May during a jubilant ceremony attended by 400 friends and family in Dallas. Then in 2010, they told a much smaller crowd - their two young kids - that they were divorcing. Both separately refer to that day as the worst of their lives.
Their journey back to one another is thanks in no small part to an unlikely source: the pandemic. For many relationships, the shutdown acted like an accelerant. New relationships intensified quickly or fizzled out entirely. And the forced proximity meant that longer-term partners saw cracks in their bond that might have otherwise stayed hidden. For the Fonbergs, though, it instigated a living arrangement that wouldn’t be out of place in a romance novel.
During the spring of 2020, Mitchell and Caryn, who by then lived states apart, hunkered down in Mitchell’s mid-century modern Dallas home with their then-college-aged kids. Amid family viewings of The Bachelor, shared dinners and nights spent chatting over the firepit - and years removed from the simmering resentments that had caused their split - Mitchell and Caryn remembered the admiration and glee that compelled them to choose each other in the first place.
Their initial meeting was a fleeting run-in at a singles event in 1995. Mitchell, then 38, wasn’t quite available that evening - he had been set up with an acquaintance of Caryn’s. Three months later, the two chatted at another singles event (clearly, the setup wasn’t a success). He called afterward to ask her out. Their first date was boating with friends.
“She had this little spunk and sparkle in her eye,” Mitchell says. “She’s just got this little ‘it’ factor. Yeah, I had a feeling from the very beginning, which was unusual. I’ve never had that before.”
They quickly learned they had similar values and were both active in the local Jewish community.
“I just remember seeing him when I walked down the aisle … I was probably more in awe than anything, you know, like I can’t believe this is happening to me,” says Caryn, who is about 10 years younger than Mitchell. “Going through life, I don’t feel like I was chosen a lot … but I felt like I was chosen by Mitchell.”
They describe their early married life as happy. Their son Blake was born in 1998, followed by Jenna in 2000. They both loved their kids but felt overwhelmed. Their lives - and their relationship - significantly changed.
“I just thought she knew what she was doing. She thought I knew what I was doing,” Mitchell says. “But neither of us knew what we were doing.”
Mitchell worked fulltime running his family’s real estate investment firm and Caryn sought part-time work, in addition to caring for the kids. She envisioned that in the evenings, Mitchell would come home and the family would eat dinner together. It rarely panned out that way.
In hindsight, Mitchell wishes he had better appreciated how taxing Caryn’s days were.
“I would work and then I’d come home and she’d be like, ‘Here, he’s yours.’ You know, like I’m exhausted; I didn’t understand that. So I was like, ‘I worked all day, too’,” he says. “I get it now. There’s no job harder than being a mother.”
It became a self-reinforcing cycle. “In my mind, I wanted us to be like a family unit all the time and go do things all the time,” Caryn says. “Now I know, like, his stimulation levels - like it was overwhelming for him to do that all the time. So I think I started resenting that, and he was probably resenting the fact that I wanted that.”
Blake and Jenna have mostly good memories of their early childhood. Blake remembers lying in bed with his dad and sister, listening to radio host Delilah’s nightly call-in show. But he also recalls hearing his parents bicker - even though they tried to hide it from him.
A self-described “nosy kid”, Blake would put his ear up to their door. “I’d question them a lot, just in general. I’d be like, ‘Do you guys promise you’ll never get a divorce?’ I was always scared of a divorce from a very young age.”
Mitchell and Caryn tried couples therapy multiple times, but found themselves at an impasse and decided to divorce in 2010. They pledged to always put the kids - then 12 and 10 - first and meticulously planned how to break the news.
It was a tough day. “I remember them taking us into the playroom and telling us and I think I said like I was never going to talk to them again,” Jenna says. “Definitely, it broke my heart.”
Blake held on to a lot of anger, especially toward his dad, whom he blamed for his mother’s sadness. It didn’t help that Mitchell started dating again within the Dallas Jewish community. Caryn hatched a plan to decamp for Colorado, where the man she was dating lived, after Jenna graduated high school.
“I didn’t want to be a part of everything,” she says. “It was just too hard to see him out.”
As far as divorces go, though, Mitchell and Caryn stayed on good terms: They still communicated about their kids and attended their school events. They often did holidays together. Neither saw themselves getting married again.
Jenna says that friends who saw them interact were surprised that her parents were divorced. Blake held out hope that his parents might get back together.
“He, growing up, would always say to me, ‘They’re gonna get back … together one day’,” says Jenna, who was sceptical and would tell him as much. “I didn’t want him to get so excited in his head because I know that’s exactly what he wanted to happen. Of course, I wanted that to happen, too.”
In early March 2020, Caryn came to Dallas to attend a bar mitzvah. She would stay with her parents, who lived near Mitchell, during her visits.
When the pandemic hit, though, the kids landed back at Mitchell’s, and Caryn remained in Dallas. At first, she would pop over to the house for a meal and then head back to her parents’. But Mitchell made a compelling case: The best time with the kids happened in the in-between moments. “And I said, ‘Well, why don’t you just stay over? Start sleeping over, because that way you’re there in the morning, you’re there when they go to sleep’,” he says.
Caryn agreed, and all four Fonbergs were living in the same house for the first time in a decade. This time, there was no rushing to and from. The pandemic ensured that they were all together, all the time.
Mitchell and Caryn each began noticing some of the ways the decade had changed the other for the better. Caryn saw Mitchell operate with more emotional intelligence. Mitchell marvelled at Caryn’s competence and loved watching her be a mum to their kids.
“He said something to me like, ‘Gosh, Car, you can do anything’,” Caryn says. “I remember saying to him, ‘Oh my God, I used to wish you would look at me in that way when we were younger’ … and I remember saying, ‘and I probably wasn’t doing [what it took] to get that kind of response’. He goes, ‘But I probably didn’t notice.’ You know, he took responsibility, and I took responsibility.”
After Blake and Jenna went to bed, sometimes their parents would stay up late to chat and watch television shows together. But they had separate bedrooms and maintain that the relationship was still platonic.
“They both were starting to understand each other more as friends, without the pressure of having to maintain … a romantic relationship,” Blake says. “The four of us kind of grew into this unit of friendship.”
Even after the immediate lockdown subsided and their bubble popped, Mitchell and Caryn continued spending time together. They’d send Blake and Jenna photos of them at dinner or socialising with mutual friends. The kids weren’t quite sure whether it was a continuation of the friendliness they had observed or something else entirely.
When both parents contracted Covid-19 in late 2021, they shacked up together at Mitchell’s and ordered takeout food to ride out the illness. (They still had separate bedrooms, per Caryn and Mitchell.)
So what was the big moment? The equivalent of the romance movie’s airport chase scene? It wasn’t quite that dramatic. Imagine instead more than a year of small signals, of noticing subtle changes you admire and remembering the joy of an old inside joke. How the heavy weight of history can feel light when you share it and how the privilege of time grants you the empathy you once lacked.
Ultimately, one conversation solidified that Mitchell and Caryn were ready to Do This. That they were willing to risk the happy friendship for the promise of something more.
Mitchell’s father, who had always loved Caryn, was dying. She was sitting outside when Mitchell approached. “He’s like, ‘I love you. There’s nothing more in life [than] when I look at the kids and I look at us and when we’re together as a family unit … I just don’t want to spend my life with anyone else’,” Caryn recalls.
But even after they got back together romantically, Caryn didn’t expect a proposal. Blake, who still loves to intervene, played a part. He was thrilled that his childhood dream was coming true, but he was also a little terrified - what would happen if it didn’t work out again and the equilibrium they had all built shattered?
Blake wanted to see a more official commitment, ideally in the form of a ring. At first, Mitchell didn’t see the necessity. But after lots of chats with his son, he realised how meaningful it would be to his family to make it official. This time, he wanted to say, was forever. His understanding of love had expanded in the nearly three decades since their first marriage; it’s a feeling, sure, but what really matters is what you do with it.
When Mitchell got down on one knee in the Carlsbad sand, Caryn was shocked. It felt different than the first time. “This time it’s like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’ Like we’re solidifying our love and this peace and what we have,” she says. “And I feel so grateful that I found him and that we’ve chosen each other.”
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