He told his mother there was ‘no way’ he’d meet someone in Australia. Then he fell in love at first sight

Mike Grossman was adamant he wasn’t going to fall for anyone in Australia.

After all, he would only be in Melbourne for a couple of months before returning to his life in the US — and Mike “wasn’t a fling type of person”.

After packing up his life in Boston, Mike stopped off at his parents’ house in California where his mother pulled him aside.

“What will you do if you meet somebody in Australia?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

“There’s literally no way that’s going to happen,” Mike firmly replied.

He emphasised he was going to Australia for work, not to find love.

“I emphatically told my mother it wasn’t possible,” Mike tells CNN Travel today.

“And then off I went.”

Mike arrived in Melbourne, Australia on a June morning in 1988 — bleary-eyed from the travel, but looking forward to the weeks before him which seemed ripe with possibility.

“I was excited,” Mike recalls.

“I had no specific plan other than just I thought it would be an interesting experience to be in a different country. That was it.”

‘A cinematic moment’

In 1988, when Mike was 23 and studying at Harvard Law School, he heard through the college grapevine about an opportunity for US students to spend a couple of months as an associate at an Australian law firm. Mike applied.

“I ended up getting it,” Mike says.

“I’d never been anywhere remotely close to Australia before.”

While Mike thought the likelihood of finding love in Australia was next to none — he did want to push himself out of his comfort zone during his stint in Melbourne.

“I’m naturally quite introverted,” Mike explains.

Before law school, he’d lived in San Francisco for a year and “ended up feeling I had allowed my introversion to get the better of me”, he says.

“I stayed by myself a lot. I wasn’t very social.”

Mike was determined not to repeat his mistakes and to make the most of his time in Melbourne, “to meet a lot of people, to push myself to be much more extroverted than I would naturally be”.

So when, at the end of his first week in the job, Mike heard the company was holding Friday drinks in the boardroom, he pushed aside his tiredness and made sure he was there.

“I even got there early,” Mike recalls.

He remembers thinking: “This is the sort of event I would never normally go to but I’m going to it because I’m going to meet people.”

At first, the empty room didn’t bode well.

“But gradually the boardroom started filling up,” Mike recalls.

He glanced around, noticing some familiar faces from his first week at work. There were smiles and handshakes and small talk and beer bottles clinking as his colleagues toasted the beginning of the weekend.

Suddenly, Mike found himself standing next to an unfamiliar face. A woman, who looked up at him, smiled and introduced herself as Wati.

It felt, for a minute, like everything else melted away. Like they were the only two people in the room.

“A cinematic moment,” as Mike puts it today.

“We shook hands in the middle of the boardroom and looked at each other. It really was a lightning bolt,” he says.

“And that’s where it all started.”

Wati’s perspective

Wati Abdurrachman was a recent graduate of Melbourne’s Monash University law school who, in June 1988, had just started working as a trainee lawyer.

Wati, then 24, was “ready to buckle down and spend the year working hard,” she tells CNN Travel today.

That didn’t leave much time for a social life outside of work and Wati says the “camaraderie among all the article clerks was pretty much the extent of my socialising”.

It helped that Wati’s twin sister, Yanti, was also a newly qualified lawyer who worked in the same building. The sisters were close, sharing an apartment in downtown Melbourne and grateful to have each other to unload about work stress.

In early June, Yanti mentioned in passing that a young American guy had temporarily joined her department.

Yanti worked in mergers and acquisitions, while Wati was in banking and finance.

“But my sister didn’t mention Michael in any detail, only that he existed,” Wati says.

When the sisters found themselves at Friday drinks, Yanti pointed Mike out.

“That’s the American,” she said, nudging her sister.

Mike was vaguely aware of this exchange, out of the corner of his eye. And then suddenly Mike and Wati were standing side by side, and then shaking hands.

For Wati, meeting Mike’s eye for the first time was also “like something out of a movie”.

She still remembers he was wearing “a yellow tie and a pinstripe suit” and she also remembers being struck by his height — there was a good several inches between them.

Most of all, Wati remembers feeling — like Mike — as though they were the only two people in the room.

Yanti immediately picked up on the vibe and stepped aside to let the two of them connect.

“Then, later on, when we left, she was like, ‘Oh, so you like him’,” Wati recalls.

Getting to know one another

Wati and Mike’s first conversation at the Friday drinks was memorable but brief — just “our names, a little bit about who we were,” as Mike now recalls it.

Soon after, they arranged to have lunch together. It wasn’t a date, Mike and Wati both told themselves, just a chance to get to know someone new.

Mike and Wati enjoyed each other’s company from the offset. Sitting opposite each other in the Italian restaurant, they found themselves leaning in to learn more about one another.

Wati particularly recalls a moment when Mike was talking about his family in California.

“Then he whipped out his wallet and he showed me these pictures of his mum and his sister and his dad and his grandparents,” Wati recalls.

She thought it was “very charming” that 20-something Mike carried family photos in his wallet.

“It spoke to his character and what his priorities were,” Wati says. “He was close to his family and I thought that was very special.”

Mike and Wati didn’t talk much at work — in part because they were in different departments, and in part because the law firm didn’t encourage any hint of workplace romance.

“But a week later, we decided to get together on a Saturday and we spent most of the day together,” Mike recalls.

“There was a (Paul) Gauguin exhibit at the National Gallery of Victoria. We walked around, got rained on. We went to dinner. And then she got me dancing, which was a scary concept.”

Wati took Mike to a busy discotheque, where they met up with a group of her friends.

“Back in the late ‘80s, that was a thing young people did,” Wati says.

“Except not this young person,” Mike adds with a laugh.

He wasn’t a confident dancer, to put it mildly.

“Yeah, I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, he’s a terrible dancer’,” Wati says, joining in the laughter. “Really dorky.”

But Mike’s dance moves — or lack thereof — didn’t kill the connection. The next week, the two arranged to see the musical Cats which was on tour in Melbourne.

When Mike’s parents discovered their son willingly bought two tickets for a feline-themed Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, they guessed his mother’s worries had come true — he’d met someone. Someone significant.

“But I’m not even sure I had fully realised how it was starting to progress,” Mike says.

By that point, it was mid-July 1988. Mike had arrived in early June. In early August, he was set to leave Australia for good.

“And in that three-week period before I left, that’s when things got really serious,” Mike recalls.

Mike and Wati started spending all their free time together. They’d stay up late chatting about their lives, dreams, families, friends, favourite movies and TV shows.

“One of the things I was very passionate about, and I’m still passionate about, is Star Trek,” Mike says.

“Wati had never actually seen any Star Trek and so I decided it was very important that she get immersed. I rented Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III and IV — a big trilogy.”

Mike set up the VHS “to great fanfare”. Wati made it through the first movie but fell asleep in the second.

While Mike and Wati shared a profession, when it came to their personalities and hobbies they were pretty different.

Where Mike was quiet and introverted, Wati was pretty outgoing and confident. She loved evenings spent dancing and enjoying the theatre, Mike preferred staying home watching TV (especially, as established, Star Trek).

They came from different backgrounds, too. Mike was a white American who’d been brought up by Jewish parents. Wati was an Indonesian Australian who’d grown up in a Muslim household.

Wati’s parents moved from Indonesia to Australia in the 1950s to work for the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

“My parents were among a handful of Asians in Australia back then,” Wati says.

“Now, of course, the country is very multicultural and diverse.”

As an interracial couple, Wati and Mike recall being “stared at” as they went out and about in Melbourne.

“In those days, interracial relationships were less common, certainly in Australia,” Wati says.

“People assumed we weren’t together. It was a very different era.”

“People also assumed we were very different,” Mike adds.

But he says their differences were on a “superficial level”. He says he and Wati realised early on they shared values, and they always had fun together, always supporting one another. And while they had different pop culture tastes, they both loved cinema.

“He had this long list of American movies while I was a snob because I like foreign films,” Wati says with a laugh.

“The truth is, we’re actually quite similar,” Mike says.

“We both laugh at the same things,” Wati adds.

“We both came from close-knit families,” Mike says.

It was hard to define but it felt like they just fit together.

“It felt natural, obvious,” Mike says.

Long distance

Before long it was August and Mike’s time in Australia was drawing to a close.

“As I was getting ready to leave, it really forced a decision of sorts, of ‘Well, wait a minute, is this about to end, are we going to say goodbye forever?’ And that didn’t seem like an option, frankly,” Mike recalls.

“Very quickly there was a sense of, ‘This is going to continue, and I’m going to figure out how to get back to Australia, and Wati will visit the States at some point’.”

Making the decision to continue the relationship was the easy part. Making it work long distance was more complicated.

When Mike went back to Boston, about 17,000km and a pretty substantial stretch of ocean separated him from Wati.

It was the late 1980s. The only way of staying in touch was via crackly, expensive long-distance phone calls and letters mailed across the globe.

“I was writing longhand letters every night to Michael, and going to the post office and mailing them,” Wati recalls.

She enjoyed letter-writing and grew up sending airmail to her grandparents in Indonesia. But it wasn’t an easy way to maintain a romantic relationship.

“We did not have email. Forget about Facebook,” Wati points out.

“Technology was not a player. It was not a help to us at all. It was very old school — telephone and longhand letters, and also audio cassettes.”

Mike, not a natural letter-writer, found taping cassettes an easier way of updating Wati on his life in Boston. He’d record himself talking about his thoughts and feelings, updates on college and friends and family, then package the tapes up and send them to Wati. It was a kind of less immediate, 1980s version of the voice note.

“He’d mail them to me in these little padded envelopes,” Wati recalls.

“Then I’d listen to the cassettes on my Sony Walkman. We’d talk about daily life, but also background, family dynamics, what was happening at school for him, books we’d recommend, movies you have to watch …”

Wati recalls sitting listening to the tapes, absorbing Mike’s words, imagining his face, wishing he was there beside her.

“It seems kind of crazy in retrospect,” Mike says of the decision to embark on a long-distance relationship after only a few weeks of serious dating.

“It was a leap of faith. But I’m not sure I was aware it was a leap of faith. I just felt this is what I have to do. And there was no ambivalence about it.”

Wati was similarly committed.

“I just felt, ‘This is something. This is real. This guy is a good guy’,” she recalls.

Before Mike left Australia, his parents and sister had flown out to visit and met Wati. They’d liked her, but Mike’s parents were a little concerned about Mike moving permanently to Australia — which they thought was looking increasingly likely.

Meanwhile, Wati had introduced her parents to Mike before he left Melbourne. He’d gotten along pretty well with them, especially Wati’s father who’d given Mike a tour of his workplace, Radio Australia.

Wati was shocked but happy her father and Mike seemed to gel so well.

“He never liked any of my boyfriends,” Wati says. “So it was a good sign, a good omen.”

But other members of Wati’s family questioned her decision to embark on a relationship with a man who lived in another country.

“I had so many naysayers on my end, people who’d met him, those who hadn’t,” she says. “They were all like, ‘Are you crazy?’.”

Still, Wati and Mike ignored other people’s worries and questions. They focused on staying in touch and finding a way to be in the same time zone again.

“Eventually, I was able to figure out how to get some credit for doing a paper at Melbourne University in January 1989,” Mike recalls.

“So, I flew back at Christmas and was there for about six weeks.”

During that period, Mike stayed with Wati in the apartment she shared with her sister, who was out of town for most of the six weeks.

“So. all of a sudden, we were living together,” Mike recalls.

This period only brought Mike and Wati closer and made them all the more certain they had a future together.

A trip to the US

In February 1989, Mike had to return to Boston but Wati arranged to visit him that March.

She planned to travel with her father, who’d never been to the US and always wanted to go.

The idea was Mike would show Wati and her father Boston and his home state of California, and they’d also visit Washington DC and New York City.

But right before the trip, Wati’s father suffered a heart attack and unexpectedly passed away.

The days that followed were a devastating blur.

“I wasn’t able to get back in time for the funeral and it was really very tough,” Mike says.

“There was some question of whether Wati was still going to come to the US. But she ended up coming, about a week or so later.”

Wati recalls being “in a fog” in the immediate aftermath of her father’s death. But she was glad to spend time with Mike.

“We got to see some very cool things, which I’d always wanted to see — amazing art galleries in Washington DC and New York,” Wati recalls.

“We didn’t really talk about my dad passing away really explicitly, but to just have the opportunity to see so many things was a perfect distraction.”

Plus, Mike was “very supportive in a not-annoying way,” as Wati puts it.

“Very often it’s easy to be triggered in a way that’s uncomfortable, and he did not do that at all,” she says.

And Wati was also comforted by the knowledge of how much her father had liked Mike.

A ‘small but perfect’ wedding

In the middle of 1989, Mike secured another seasonal job at another Melbourne law firm. And while he was there, he asked Wati to marry him.

In the lead-up to the engagement, Mike and Wati had talked about marriage and decided it was the next step to securing their future together. They’d looked at rings together, and Wati — who has an eye for fashion and design — had helped design her own engagement ring.

So the proposal was far from a surprise, but the manner by which Mike went about it was unexpected.

In July 1989, while walking in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, Mike proposed to Wati by handing her a fortune cookie.

“I first got a fortune cookie from a Chinese restaurant. Then, I removed the existing fortune using tweezers. Then, I typed up the proposal message, and cut the paper to its appropriate size. And then, I placed the proposal message into the cookie,” Mike explains.

Standing in the Botanic Gardens, Wati cracked open the cookie and read her personalised fortune: “If you say yes, he will marry you.”

This was an homage to the movie Field Of Dreams in which Kevin Costner’s main character is told” “If you build it, they will come.”

It was a film Mike and Wati had watched together and both enjoyed. Wati was touched.

After another year navigating long distance, Mike and Wati were married at Harvard Memorial Church on June 9, 1990. The date was chosen for its symbolic significance for the couple.

“It was two years to the day from when we’d met in the boardroom,” Mike says.

“When I say the day, I should be more precise. We met on June 10 in Australia. We got married on June 9 in the United States. But if you do the time conversion, it actually is two years to the day.”

The couple chose Harvard Memorial Church because it’s an interdenominational church — this seemed appropriate, given their different religious backgrounds.

And by then, Wati and Mike had decided they would live in Australia once they got married, so the wedding taking place in the US seemed like a compromise of sorts.

Wati — who took Mike’s name following the wedding, becoming Wati Grossman — says Mike “organised the whole day,” which she was grateful for. He was local to Boston, after all, but also great at planning.

Wati describes the resulting wedding as “small and perfect — 50 people gathering at Harvard Memorial Church followed by a reception at the nearby Sheraton Hotel. Among the attendees were Wati’s family, while her father’s best friend flew from Indonesia to walk her down the aisle.

Making decisions

After the wedding, Mike and Wati settled in Sydney, where they both started working for local law firms.

The idea was that Sydney, unlike Melbourne, was “a place that was new for both of us” as Mike puts it.

The newlyweds weren’t sure if they’d live in Australia forever, but they figured they’d start in Sydney “and kind of go from there”.

Mike remembers thinking that any difficulties life threw their way would be easier than their two years of navigating long distances across continents.

But looking back, he realises he and Wati “didn’t really know each other that well” when they got married.

They’d been dating for two years but had never lived in the same place for an extended period of time. It could have all gone wrong when they got married.

“We were lucky,” Mike says today. “It just felt natural.”

Wati agrees: “It was so fortunate that, given the leap of faith that each of us took, we each turned out to be really pretty easygoing people.”

She adds living together in Sydney only re-emphasised that they were “extremely compatible, with similar values, standards, morals”.

Wati especially appreciated Mike’s support during that period, as she began increasingly questioning whether law was the career for her.

“I started thinking I potentially wanted to study fashion,” Wati recalls.

“I was always making things as a kid and sewing and knitting and crocheting and embroidering — all the needle crafts — and I could see things sort of three dimensionally.”

Wati began looking into fashion schools, and wondered aloud to Mike about the possibility of studying in New York City. Mike was open to the idea of moving back to the US.

So in 1991, the couple left Australia and Wati started studying fashion at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Later, she started working on Seventh Ave, in the city’s fashion district.

When it came to their careers, Wati says there was “an acceptance and understanding” between herself and Mike “that it was definitely a give and take, and not both of us immediately would get what we wanted but in the long run we would”.

While Wati enjoyed working in New York City’s fashion arena, Mike began contemplating a career change. In 1994, the couple relocated to California so Mike could found a start-up in Silicon Valley. In California, Wati worked for the Gap and Levis Strauss and Company, before founding her own fashion brand.

During the early years of their marriage, there were times when Wati’s career was more stable and Mike’s was in flux, and times when she was the one taking risks while his work offered more stability.

“In this era, it wasn’t common for people to reinvent themselves,” Wati says.

“You went to school and you studied something, and then that’s what you did, and you stayed in it for decades and decades.”

Wati recalls some people thinking the couple were “wacky” for each trying something new in their late 20s. But Mike and Wati were unwavering in their support for each other’s ambitions and dreams.

And then, in 1996, the couple welcomed their first child, a boy called Alex. Six years later, their daughter Talia was born.

Mike’s parents helped bring up the kids when Mike and Wati were busy with work, while Wati’s mother visited every year from Australia.

“She would stay for about a month or a little bit more,” Wati recalls.

“She’s a very good cook and she’d cook all this Indonesian food. And so, from a very young age, the kids’ Indonesian-ness, their Asian-ness, was very much part of who they are.”

As their children grew up, Wati and Mike encouraged them to embrace all aspects of their identities.

“It was important that they understood that they were many things, and it was never a question of choosing one thing or another,” Mike says, adding “they’re both Australian citizens as well as US citizens”.

Wati and Mike have always been “very much in step in terms of how you raise kids, and what your expectations are,” Wati says.

“We have this Grossman family creed that we taught the kids from a very young age,” she adds.

“It’s telling the truth, treating people well with kindness, trying your best and being original. We’ve taught them that to celebrate your uniqueness is an affirmatively good thing.”

A life-defining love

Today, Wati and Mike still live in California. In recent years, Wati’s stepped back from her fashion brand and is focused on her magazine, Circle Ahead, which emphasises a more environmental approach to fashion.

Meanwhile Mike is taking a break after years of working as the CEO for various technology companies, although he’s still on the board of directors for a couple of corporations.

When they’re not working, the couple still enjoy evenings spent chatting and watching movies together. (Mike’s still a Star Trek fan, Wati still is definitely not.)

The couple’s kids are both in their 20s, finding themselves and exploring their dreams.

Talia is currently studying in Australia and, before she left, Wati and Mike encouraged her to approach it in the same way Mike jumped into his time in Melbourne.

The couple hope she’ll approach the experience “open to experiences, open to opportunities, friendships, an open mind”.

Looking back today on that “cinematic moment” when Mike and Wati first crossed paths, Wati says she feels especially glad that “in the moment I was open, open to the opportunity, open to the possibility”.

And when she thinks about Mike as a father, Wati thinks back to the moment he showed her photographs of his parents in his wallet during their first lunch together.

Mike still has photos of his loved ones in his wallet — but now he treasures photos of Wati and their kids.

As for Mike, when he considers his “cinematic moment” with Wati, he finds himself getting emotional.

“From that first moment we met, we had an instant connection and we’ve been seamlessly aligned ever since. I’m grateful for that,” he says.

“It didn’t occur to me that going to Australia for a couple months was going to redefine the entire trajectory of my life. It just wasn’t something that seemed remotely possible, but I’m incredibly thankful that it did. I just can’t imagine being more fortunate.”