Every ounce of you will know that this is right and that you are in it for the long haul.

Growing up your grandma always told me that love wasn’t a fairy tale and that cliches surrounding love were just that, cliches. She said that you had to work hard to keep a relationship going and that no one had it all. I guess maybe she didn’t want me to have too high expectations, to protect me from being hurt if it just never happened. To a large extent I think this is good advice and some that you should think about taking on board, but I’m going to caveat it with, in my experience at least, when you first find that special person, the one you want to spend the rest of your life with, you will know, everything will be easy and you’ll feel like you’ve hit the jackpot. At the start it will be like the movies, you will have butterflies when you kiss them and each time you part ways you will be looking forward to the next time you are going to see them. Every ounce of you will know that this is right and that you are in it for the long haul. What you should definitely not be feeling is that things are unequal or have major doubts about the fundamentals of their character. It took me a while to figure this out, I spent years with someone who I was desperate would feel the way I did, hoping one day he would see me the way I saw him and then with A there was always a niggling feeling that it wasn’t right, that underneath it all we wanted very different things. Then your dad came along and everything changed.

In the summer term of 2007 he had been granted a sabbatical to take a break from work and travel the world. He went away with a friend from home and it would be the trip of a lifetime that I’m sure one day he’ll tell you all about, probably more than once. I received an email from him when he arrived in Loas just as things with A were getting messy. My head was all over the place and I’m pretty surprised he didn’t run a mile when my response to the email was that I was looking for a new housemate and did he want to live with me. In fact, reading back through those messages I definitely would have have stayed clear of me. Instead he very politely told me I needed to get things sorted but maybe we could have another chat when he returned at the end of the summer. 

After a six weeks back at home getting my head straight and going on a much needed break to Spain with just the right people I came back to London that September ready to start afresh. Your dad was looking to buy a place after selling his part of the flat he owned with his ex but in the meantime needed somewhere to stay. We began to look for a flat together (two bedroom of course) and after a few weeks found a place very close to work. Then, the weekend before we were due to move in, after a big night on the town that involved a random birthday party, a fairly scary rickshaw ride, a drink you should never touch called black sambuca and a club you should never visit called Zoo Bar the second bedroom became redundant.

Of course we couldn’t tell anyone, they would think we were crazy, we’d been together about a week and were moving in together so we kept it quiet for a couple of months and lived in our own little bubble. I was so happy, things felt different, they felt right. I remember thinking how lucky I was to have found someone who made me feel like this and he felt the same.

Two months later we started to look for our first house. We found a lovely little cottage that needed a lot of modernizing and despite your dad not really wanting to take on a big project, we loved the house and so started a renovation cycle that has now lasted ten years and counting. We quickly began talking about marriage and children, for both of us the question was not if but when, we felt we had all the time in the world and so for now we were going to work hard, go on some amazing holidays and build a home together.

Love mum xx