Cherchez la Femme

Cherchez la Femme — Or: How a Woman in a Rock Bar Changed Everything

The Woman Who Changed Everything (Or: how a rock bar in rural Hungary turned out to be the best decision I ever made.)

There's an old saying — cherchez la femme. Look for the woman.

I wasn't looking. I was in a rock bar.

Which, in hindsight, is probably how it's supposed to work.

My second wife and I met in a small town about 200 kilometres from Budapest — the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, the rock bar is the cultural centre, and a guy from the capital showing up slightly dishevelled is considered mildly exotic.

It took some logistics to make things work. She was there, I was in Budapest, and coordinating visits required the kind of planning I had not previously applied to anything in my life. But I managed. Occasionally I even arrived on time.

A few visits turned into something that worked. Something that, as I'm writing this in 2026 — about 29 years later — apparently still works. So I think we can call that a successful experiment.

The Attic

When we decided to move in together, we found a small attic flat in Budapest. Mansard room, low ceiling, charm in inverse proportion to square footage. The landlord lived downstairs and kept pigeons, which created its own particular atmosphere — but that's a story for another time.

The important thing is that for the first time in a long while, I had something resembling stability. A roof that was specifically mine. A reason to show up somewhere consistently.

And apparently, once those basic conditions were in place, other things started to follow.

The Slight Detour Through the Entire Education System

I was working. Steadily, which was new. And at some point the thought occurred to me — since I was already doing the impossible by holding down a job and a relationship simultaneously — why not also finish my high school diploma?

I had made an attempt at this during my first marriage. That had not gone well, for reasons related to the marriage rather than the studying.

This time I approached it differently. Specifically: I found a three-year school in the 16th district that would let me compress the first two years into one, sitting exams every six months instead of waiting around in classrooms. I did not particularly want to spend four years in a school desk while also working and helping raise a child. Two years of material in one year seemed like a reasonable trade.

It went well enough that when the year ended, I found myself thinking: why sit through two more years when there's presumably another school somewhere doing the same thing for the second half?

There was. Different district, same logic. Six months per year of material, exam, move on.

I finished my high school diploma in two years total. The results were, if I'm being honest, better than expected — which is a sentence I had not previously had occasion to use about myself academically.

This led, with a certain inevitability, to the thought: well, since I'm here anyway...

I applied to three colleges. Got into the first one. Started an engineering degree.

The Engineering Years

By the time I was studying communications engineering, I had also managed to work my way out of the metalwork shop at my job and into something closer to design. No formal qualifications yet — but I'd learned the 3D software, understood the technical side, and was doing actual design work on custom low-floor buses. The company no longer exists, which saves me the awkwardness of naming it.

College, meanwhile, introduced me to a large number of people who were technically competent but occasionally struggled with mathematics, mechanics, and technical drawing. I was, it turned out, unusually good at explaining these things. My classmates figured this out faster than I did.

The landlord's phone — we were renting by then, somewhere with a ground floor and no pigeons — rang constantly. Always the same message from downstairs: "come down, they're looking for you again."

Eventually my classmates got tired of waiting for the landlord to relay messages. They pooled their money, bought a mobile phone and a SIM card, topped it up, and handed it to me.

That was my first mobile phone. Earned through mathematics tutoring, which is not a sentence I would have predicted writing in 1986 in an underpass in Budapest.

What Actually Changed

I want to be straight about this, because it matters.

None of the above — the diploma, the degree, the job, the phone, the slow accumulation of something that looked increasingly like a normal life — happened because I suddenly became a different person. I didn't find discipline from nowhere. I didn't wake up one morning with ambition I hadn't had the night before.

What changed was that I had someone beside me who made stability feel possible. Who didn't flinch at where I'd come from. Who just — quietly, consistently — made it easier to keep going than to stop.

I rebuilt from the ground up, but I didn't do it alone. And pretending otherwise would make a better story but a worse truth.

She knows who she is.

Thank you.

The lesson, if you're looking for one: the environment you're in shapes what you think is possible. Change the environment — or find someone who changes it for you — and suddenly the list of impossible things gets noticeably shorter.

This also applies to online marketing, but we'll get to that.

— Eugene B.