Not long after I arrived in the United States, I was approached by an organization that had been chartered to give blind people seeing-eye dogs. “It’s completely free,” the representative assured me. “We’ll even train him for you.”

I’d never had a service animal in Morocco, nor had I felt the need for one. I’d gotten on perfectly well with assistance from friends, supplemented by my cane. Still, I liked the thought of having a companion and seriously considered the offer—but then something occurred to me.

I called the representative back. “But how will I deal with the poop?”

“That’s easy,” she said. “We’ll train you on that, too. You’ll just put a bag around your hand and pick it up.”

“But what if there’s a hole in the bag?”

The silence on the other end told me everything I needed to know about living with a service animal.

I dropped the idea of getting a seeing-eye dog and went on with my life. Little did I know that my future seeing-eye husband, born twenty-four years earlier in North Carolina, was already thoroughly toilet-trained.

* * *

While in grad school, I met an excitable young man who was working on a master’s in computer engineering. This wasn’t my future seeing-eye husband, but soon after we met, he did become obsessed with the idea of building me a robotic seeing-eye dog. We spent hours working on the project together, brainstorming, making lists of features, functions, and specifications that the dog should have, and identifying logistical problems that it would help its users solve.

“The most important thing,” I said at one point, “is to make sure this dog never poops.”

After familiarizing himself with the latest research on robotics, however, my friend had second thoughts about the dog. “It’s going to have a lot of problems,” he explained. “I don’t think it will even be able to climb stairs. I’m just going to build an app instead.”

Then he stopped answering his phone. I tried asking around, but no one had heard from him. No one knew what had happened to him or where he was. Days passed, then weeks, then months. I didn’t hear from him. I started to worry.

When we did eventually reconnect, almost a year later, I was relieved to learn that he was fine: he’d simply dropped off the map for a while, overwhelmed with grad school.

“Where’s the dog?” I asked after making sure that all was well. “I mean, the app?”

“Oh,” he said, “it’s a paper! I wrote it already!”

“Just a paper?”

“That’s right.”

“You mean, you never built anything?”

“Not yet,” he said, “but now anyone can read the paper and build as many dogs as they want!”

As far as I know, no one’s ever built a robot dog, or even an app, based on my friend’s paper, but I’m not waiting in suspense because I’ve got my seeing-eye husband now—and he knows how to climb stairs.

* * *

I’ve always been an independent person. While my peers were searching for husbands, I was fighting for my education, learning languages, practicing skills, and trying to launch a career. It was easy for me to let go of the seeing-eye dog, and the seeing-eye robot, and even the app that my friend tried to build because even before gaining access to modern technology, I’d already found ways to solve the everyday logistical problems I encountered. Likewise, I could’ve gone my entire life without a seeing-eye husband, too, never missing what I didn’t have, except for one unexpected development: I fell in love.

We met for the first time on my second day in the United States, at a welcome dinner for incoming Fulbright scholars. He attended as a cultural ambassador. Overwhelmed and exhausted, I barely registered that an American was sitting next to me. I recall nothing of our conversation. I made an impression on him, though. Later, when a mutual friend re-introduced us, he remembered every word.

During that second meeting, we discussed Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and debated the nature of human subjectivity. Since arriving in the United States, I’d been starved for such intellectual conversations. This time, I did remember.

We became friends, talking on the phone or over coffee several times a week. When I had to undergo a major surgery, he stayed with me, cooked for me, cleaned my apartment, and made sure I had everything I needed. When I had to move, he gamely loaded my suitcases into his car and drove me to another city. He even accepted my gift of a second-hand “talking lamp”—in fact, it was mute—which an organization had given to me even though I clearly didn’t need it to read by.

When I announced that I loved him and wanted to start a relationship, it came as a shock to me as well as him. Neither of us had ever been in a relationship. Both of us were uncertain how to proceed. But we did proceed. Even coming from very different cultures, even receiving no support from our families, even with the world falling apart around us—this was during the pandemic—we stuck with each other.

Now we’re married. We run a business. We’re writing several books together. In 2024, we shared a live-work studio at MacDowell, where we finished two manuscripts, my memoir and his. Whenever we’re not writing, working, or mucking around in the kitchen, inventing improbable meals, we read together. Sometimes, he reads aloud. Other times, when he needs to rest his voice, we listen to audiobooks, YouTube videos, or podcasts.

Though my seeing-eye husband does need to sleep now and then, he never runs out of battery. I don’t have to worry about whether he’s connected to WiFi, or within cord’s reach of a power outlet. He’s even learned how to talk like my screen reader.

“Smiling face with smiling eyes and rosy cheeks,” he intones mechanically, mimicking my phone’s description of an emoji to let me know he’s pleased. Or, “Smiling face with starry eyes.” Sometimes, we communicate by spelling out Braille codes. “Two four,” he tells me. “Space. One two three, one three five, one two three six, one five. Space. One three four five six, one three five, one three six. Two three five. Two three five. Two three five!”

Of course, my seeing-eye husband isn’t perfect. He does lack certain features. When I ask him to tell me what color dress I’m holding up, for instance, and whether it would look good on me, he might give me the following answer:

“Well…okay. Let me see. It’s sort of a pinkish-orange. Sort of like salmon. But not really salmon. Maybe like an overcooked salmon. I’m not really sure since I’m a vegetarian, but I’m pretty sure that if you overcooked salmon, that’s about the color you’d get. I’m talking about the inside of the salmon here, not the outside of the salmon.”

Whenever we spend more than ten minutes in the grocery store, my seeing-eye husband forgets where he parked, leaving me to consult my olfactory memory and lead us back toward the section of the parking lot that smelled like cherry blossoms, or gasoline, or French Fries.

When we’re at home, things mysteriously go missing—his glasses, his car keys, his headphones, his shoes—and he relies on me to find them. Fortunately, I have an excellent memory. Still, once I locate whatever he was looking for, my seeing-eye husband can take one look and identify it correctly, putting him miles ahead of my Amazon Echo Show, which once suggested that the apple I was holding in front of her might be a lug wrench.

I still love my devices, including my Alexa and Google Home, which used to entertain me back when I was single. That said, I’ve never imagined that they might love me in return. That reciprocity is reserved exclusively for my seeing-eye husband.

In Morocco, a long time ago, I was orphaned. For years, I faced abuse, neglect, and many forms of torture at the hands of my extended family. Eventually, I was blinded by a relative and abandoned, left to die. Against the odds, I’ve managed to survive and thrive. I’ve even learned to love myself. But although I’ve cultivated many wonderful friendships in the US, and Morocco, and around the world, I never knew what it meant to share my life with someone, to love in this way and be loved in return, until I met my seeing-eye husband.

He had also been emotionally neglected. He’s also been loved for the first time by me. Now, after many years apart, we’re giving each other something neither of us ever had while pursuing a vision of a future together. A vision that we share.