Catching Waves: A Surfer Romance

I'd never taken a vacation longer than a week until the summer I turned forty.

My name is Adrian Park. Investment banker, New York based, the kind of career that eats your life and spits out money as compensation. I'd been doing it for eighteen years, and somewhere along the way I'd forgotten what I was working toward. The corner office? Got it. The Manhattan apartment? Got that too. The relationship, the hobbies, the actual living? Those had been casualties.

My therapist suggested a sabbatical. "Three months," she said. "Go somewhere you've never been. Learn something new. Remember who you are when you're not working."

I chose California. Specifically, a small beach town near San Diego where a former colleague had a vacation home. And because I apparently couldn't do anything without a goal, I decided to learn to surf.

Kai was the instructor assigned to me by the local surf school. Early thirties, born on the islands but raised in California, with the kind of golden tan and easy smile that made me immediately self-conscious about my pale, desk-bound body.

"You ever been in the ocean before?"

"Pools. Business trips to Miami. I stayed at the hotel."

"So that's a no."

"That's a no."

He grinned, handed me a board. "This is going to be fun."

The first week was humbling. I fell off the board approximately a thousand times. Swallowed enough salt water to fill a swimming pool. Got knocked around by waves that Kai described as "barely ankle-slappers." Every muscle in my body ached in ways I didn't know muscles could ache.

But I kept going. Every morning at six, meeting Kai at the beach, paddling out into the cold Pacific. Something about the failure felt different than failure in my professional life. Less personal. More educational.

"You're trying too hard," Kai told me on day eight. "You're treating the wave like something to conquer. It's not. It's something to join."

"That sounds like something from a self-help book."

"It's something from surfing. The ocean doesn't care about your ambition or your plans. You have to meet it where it is, not where you want it to be."

I thought about that while I fell off the board for the hundredth time. Met it where it is. I'd spent my whole career forcing things, bending situations to my will. Maybe that's why I was so bad at this—I didn't know how to work with something instead of against it.

Week two, something clicked. I caught a wave—really caught it, rode it for maybe five seconds before wiping out—and when I surfaced, Kai was whooping from the beach.

"That's it! That's the feeling!"

It was. For five seconds, I'd stopped fighting and started flowing, and the wave had carried me like I belonged there.

I chased that feeling for the rest of the summer.

Somewhere between week three and week six, my lessons with Kai became more than lessons. We'd stay on the beach after I'd surfed myself to exhaustion, talking about life and work and what mattered. He'd tell me about growing up between cultures, never quite fitting in Hawaii or California. I'd tell him about the golden handcuffs of banking, the way success felt less successful every year.

"So why do you do it?"

"I don't know anymore. Habit. Fear. Not knowing what else to do."

"That's a terrible reason to do anything."

"What's your reason? For teaching surfing?"

"I love it. I love being in the water, I love watching people find their balance, I love the way the sun feels on my face. It's not complicated."

"That sounds complicated to me. Loving something that much."

He looked at me with an expression I couldn't quite read. "You've never loved something that much?"

"I don't think I have."

"Maybe that's what you need to learn this summer. Not just surfing."

I thought about it all night. Lay in bed in my borrowed beach house, staring at the ceiling, wondering when I'd stopped letting myself love things. Wondering if I still could.

Week eight, we had a sunset session. Just the two of us, everyone else gone home. The waves were perfect—small enough for my skill level, consistent enough to practice on. I rode one all the way to shore, actually stood up and stayed standing, and when I splashed out of the water Kai was there, grinning.

"You're a surfer now."

"I rode one wave."

"Doesn't matter. Once you catch that feeling, once you really get it, you're one of us."

The sun was painting the sky in oranges and pinks. The beach was empty. Kai was standing close, water dripping from his hair, looking at me like he was waiting for something.

"Kai, I need to tell you something."

"Okay."

"These past weeks—the lessons, the conversations, all of it—it's been the best summer of my life. And I think a lot of that is because of you."

"Adrian—"

"I'm not done. I know I'm a client, and this is probably weird, and I live in New York and you live here and none of this makes sense. But I don't want to go back to my old life without at least saying... I think I'm falling for you. And I needed you to know."

He kissed me as the sun slipped below the horizon. His lips tasted like salt, like ocean, like everything I'd been missing. When we broke apart, the first stars were appearing.

"I was wondering if you'd ever say something."

"You knew?"

"I hoped. But you're hard to read. All that banker training."

"What about the rules? Instructor, client..."

"You're not my client anymore. You can surf. Lesson's over." He kissed me again. "Now you're just a guy I like who happens to be really bad at reading signals."

"I'm very good at reading spreadsheets. Signals, not so much."

"We'll work on it."

I extended the sabbatical. Then I extended it again. Somewhere around month five, my boss called and said they were filling my position if I didn't come back.

I told them to fill it.

Kai and I moved in together that winter. His small beach cottage, nothing like my Manhattan apartment, but somehow more home than any place I'd ever lived. I took a job as a financial advisor, working with individuals instead of corporations, setting my own hours. It paid a fraction of what I used to make and felt a hundred times more meaningful.

"You're happy," Kai said one morning, watching me make coffee in our tiny kitchen.

"I am."

"You sound surprised."

"I am." I handed him a cup. "I spent forty years not really knowing what happy felt like. Now I wake up and it's just... there."

"It's the surfing."

"It's you."

"It's both." He kissed my cheek. "The ocean and me, we're a package deal."

⏳ Three Years Later

We opened a surf school together last spring. Kai teaches; I handle the business side. We specialize in corporate refugees like I used to be—people who've forgotten how to live and need the ocean to remind them.

I surf every day now. Not well, but joyfully. Kai says that's more important.

We got married on the beach, barefoot, with our students and friends as witnesses. The waves were perfect. The sunset was even better. And when Kai kissed me after we said our vows, I felt that same click I'd felt the first time I really caught a wave—the sensation of not fighting anymore, of joining instead of conquering.

That's what love is, I think. Not something you conquer. Something you join.

I'm forty-three now. Best years of my life ahead of me. And every morning, I wake up to the sound of waves and the man who taught me how to ride them.

Catching waves. Catching feelings. Catching a life I didn't know I was missing.