On Love: ‘It was like the record scratches, and everything stops’

Elizabeth Ambrose felt something the first time she met Steven Johnson.

“It was like a zing up your spine,” she remembers.

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But Ambrose dismissed the feeling. She was with her boyfriend, after all. And Johnson’s girlfriend was right beside him.

That was New Year’s Eve 2002 and Ambrose was in New Orleans visiting a friend who went to law school with Johnson. A big group went to dinner and spent the night celebrating together. At the end of the weekend, Ambrose and Johnson hugged goodbye.

Ambrose never thought much about Johnson after returning to the District. But when he moved to Washington in 2006 to work at the Justice Department, they had enough mutual friends to land at the same happy hour once or twice a year.

“I noticed her every time,” Johnson says. “I remember thinking, ‘She’s still very attractive.’ ” But at every meeting, it quickly became apparent that one or the other was in a relationship.

In the summer of 2010, Johnson went through a breakup that left him reeling. Most nights, he recalls, “I was just going home to sit in the dark.” But when a friend’s birthday party rolled around in early August, he forced himself to get out of the house. He was dumbstruck when he saw Ambrose walk through the crowd.

“I was like, ‘Wow,’ ” he says. “She was stunning. It was like the record scratches, and everything stops.”

They chatted happily for a while, catching up on life. Finally, Johnson mustered the courage to ask her out to brunch the next day.

“I can’t,” replied Ambrose. “I have a standing date.” Then she explained: “I have a bulldog, and Rosie and I go to the coffee shop and read the paper every Sunday.”

Ambrose had also gone through a breakup that year. And she had begun to accept that marriage might not be in the cards. But she loved her lobbying career and had bought a rowhouse on Capitol Hill several years earlier. “I was in a really good place by my lonesome,” says Ambrose, now 38. “I was kind of at peace just being me.”

Still, they decided to go out, and dinner at Sonoma stretched over six hours, although they barely touched the food. “It was very honest,” says Johnson, now 32. “For whatever reason, I felt very comfortable opening up to her in ways you would never do on a first date.”

Johnson wasn’t sure he was ready for a new relationship, so they took things slowly, especially in the first month of dating. Most of their time together was spent talking — “just explaining to each other where we were coming from and who we are,” says Johnson, a tax attorney.

Even as the amount of time they spent together increased that fall, Ambrose refused to let herself believe it might be leading to something permanent. In many ways, Johnson seemed too good to be true. He sent flowers and opened doors, and he was smart and cute and always attentive.

“I held back quite a bit,” Ambrose says. “I didn’t want to get invested in a relationship and think, ‘Maybe we’ll get married,’ and then have it not happen.”

After Christmas, when Johnson asked the classic define-the-relationship question — “What are we?” — Ambrose deferred. “We’re happy, and we’re having fun,” she said with a shrugged. “Why do we need to make it anything more?”