Lena Dunham on falling for Luis Felber while planning on adopting a baby: 'He wanted me to have everything I dreamed of'

Lena Dunham is opening up about how she fell in love with her husband Luis Felber.

The Girls creator, who married the musician in a London ceremony this September, penned an essay for Vogue in which she recalled meeting Felber while planning to adopt a child. Dunham, who has long spoken about her often debilitating experience with endometriosis, which included multiple surgeries, had a hysterectomy in 2018.

“I had made the choice to date in parallel to the adoption process with the knowledge that whomever I was seeing would likely not be able to walk me all the way through it. After all, the last two guys I’d been involved with had said ‘but we’re so young’ when I mentioned kids,” she wrote. “Thirty-five, I regretted to inform them, was no longer prom-mom status. I didn’t feel much when these guys made it clear that fatherhood was not on their radar, but as I told Luis my plans, my throat felt like it was closing up. I knew that if this guy pushed me away, it would feel different — like real loss.”

Felber, however, only had positive things to say when she brought up her motherhood hopes.

“Instead of cowering, he told me that he wanted me to have everything I dreamed of, that I would make a beautiful mother, and — when I worried that he would suddenly find me unpalatable, less footloose and fancy-free — he assured me that ‘mum energy is hot,’” the Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood actress recalled.

Dunham has shared her parenting plans before. In 2020, she told Harper’s Magazine that she tried IVF treatments.

"The moment I lost my fertility I started searching for a baby," she shared. "At age 31, after almost two decades of chronic pain caused by endometriosis and its little-studied ravages, I had my uterus, my cervix, and one of my ovaries removed. Before then, motherhood had seemed likely but not urgent, as inevitable as growing out of jean shorts, but in the days after my surgery I became keenly obsessed with it."

The treatments proved to be successful, with Dunham learning that none of her eggs were viable.

In her Vogue essay, she likened the “loss” of her health and fertility and “the fight to find a new normal” to a “great war.” Of marrying Felber, she said, “I was being delivered to a distant yet safe shore.”