In February 2022, a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine, I sent my partner a panicked text: “Maybe we should get married.”

He thought I was joking. For years I had told him I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to get married, despite him having made clear that he wanted to marry me. I am the child of divorced parents; I was skeptical of the utility of marriage. At best, marriage was an (often expensive) expression of love — love that could be expressed in other ways that didn’t involve a change in legal status. At worst, I feared, marriage was a social and legal prison.

But that was before Russia’s invasion, before pundits and op-eds in Western media outlets began asking: Will this embolden China to invade Taiwan? Within a day of the attack, I began receiving messages from friends and family asking if I was sure it was safe to stay in Taiwan. Maybe it was time to move back?

I had been living at least part-time in Taipei for more than six years. I had moved here on a Fulbright, fully intending to return to New Jersey once the 10-month award period was over. But at the end of the fellowship, I wasn’t ready to leave.

Now I had a life here: a path I jogged, orchids I watered, friends I went out with. Most importantly, I had a partner I loved, a good man who reminded me to bring an umbrella if it looked like rain, who left me love notes and cut fruit on days depression weighed me down, who took me on impromptu trips to see fireflies in the mountains.

The problem was that my partner is Taiwanese. I don’t mean Taiwanese-American, like me. I mean local Taiwanese, someone who had never spent much time around Americans, fluent in Mandarin and Taiwanese and nothing else. I have joked with him that most Taiwanese who date foreigners improve their English. With us, I improved my Mandarin.

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