Part 2 Of Your Love Life | This is what happened to me (1)

Yes, my former husband may recall things completely differently. But this is genuinely how it seemed to me.

We met at church. Don't laugh; it still happens. Both relocating separately in our early twenties to a new city, we attended the same church but didn't meet for a year or so due to the fact he, an early bird, went to the morning service and I, who loved a lie-in,  to the evening. The day we met for the first time, something different happened to me which I still can't explain. I found myself waking up early, feeling wide awake.

A thought came from nowhere: ‘I think I’ll go to the morning service.’ Before I knew it my feet touched the bedroom floor. There was no effort involved. This was not the usual me as anyone who knows me will tell you.

Though more of a jeans girl,  I found myself choosing to wear a  brand-new dress: a deep green, Empire-line, patterned dress from Oasis. This was the dress he asked me, later on, never to give away.

I walked to church. It had a huge congregation so there was no point in looking for someone you knew to sit by. It was my habit to find a pew with maybe one or two people in it, sit there, say hello and chat to them at the end of the service if they were friendly. But being as shy as I was it took a lot of building myself up. I usually dithered, hesitated, trying to pluck up courage.

Somehow that morning, I found myself walking straight into a pew where a dark-haired, dark-complexioned, gorgeous young man sat. As I came into the pew, he turned his head, looked up at me with a smile — I can see him now — and said, ‘Hello.’ I replied to his greeting, and the thought came into my head, ‘He’s not English. He’s too friendly.’

As we sat waiting for the service to start I remember catching a glimpse of his feet in their brown suede shoes. He shuffled them slightly, and I had the strangest intuition he was intensely aware of me, and this was an unconscious way of attracting attention. I felt intensely aware of him too.

'He's not English, he's too friendly'

The service began. After the preliminaries, the vicar said, ‘Right, now turn round and talk to someone you don’t know for five minutes.’ The unknown man and I turned to each other and smiled.

My intuition proved correct. He wasn’t English. He was from Northern Ireland. That first meeting made us look out for each other every Sunday and so our relationship began.

We took it slowly, gently, but seriously. One evening after a date he surprised me by asking, ‘Can I ask you something? How do you think we’re getting on?’ I was so shocked at a man apparently taking the initiative in talking about relationships that I nearly fell off my chair. He clearly meant business. He went on to say he hoped for ‘a Christ-centred relationship,’ and when I smiled at this, he protested, ‘No, don’t laugh.’ I reassured him, ‘I’m not laughing! I’m smiling because I think it’s great, it’s lovely, I like that idea. I want that too.’   

From fairly early on we both sensed this was something special and wanted to build on it. We had the same idea what the word ‘love’ meant when used between a couple who are going out together. It’s a serious word, not to be used lightly. It’s not a word for throwing around. It’s not about a moment’s intensity. It has a hint of the long-lasting. To us it suggested that you feel that, maybe at some point in the future, marriage is a real possibility. Perhaps you’re not quite at that stage yet but there is a definite sense you may be growing towards it. Thirty years later, I still feel that way about the word. So it took quite a few months of growing closer and learning to trust each other before we admitted, yes, we loved each other, with all that implied about a possible shared future.

Romantic relationships begin with physical attraction and enjoying each other’s company but they need more to grow into real, committed love. We found we shared similar values and goals. Though we had different strengths — he was ‘sporty’, I was ‘arty’ — it was he who pointed out that even in our differences we were similar: we both aspired to achieve something different in life (he was beginning a career in a profession to which many are called but comparatively few are chosen; I wanted to be a published writer). His only nervousness, he said, was that my focus on writing might be so important to me that it came between us. I gave him some of my work to take away and read and he wrote me a letter (couples still wrote letters to each other in those days) saying now all his uncertainty about it ‘had turned right round into a real excitement about your writing’. I reassured him that commitment meant I would put my loved ones ahead of my writing.

In the light of what happened later, the painful irony of this strikes me every time I think of it.

'I love the way you just let me be me'

We had roots in common, a mixture of UK and Irish heritage from both sides of the Irish border which meant we instinctively ‘got’ each other’s background instead of having to explain it all and deal with the frustrating lack of understanding of so many people around us. ‘It’s nice to have a sensible talk about Ireland for a change,’ he mused once when we’d been going out for a few weeks. We both had a connection with aviation, he through his profession, I through having a father who loved talking about his past RAF days. Plus I had fallen in love with flying since reading and watching Flambards as a teenager. The same things made us laugh and we shared an emotional rapport. ‘Katrina, I love the way you just let me be me,’ he once said.