liv | Decade

So ten years ago today, I officially started going out with

jack. I realized that some people who've met me since then haven't heard the story, and the anniversary means I feel like recounting it.

I knew

jack peripherally via Cambridge circles, and we were friends on LJ. Towards the end of 2007 he was commenting on my journal a lot, and I thought maybe he was flirting, so I asked mutual friends, and they said, oh, that's just Jack, he flirts with everyone, don't take it personally.

He invited me to a party, assuming I wouldn't be able to come since I was living in Sweden at the time, but he usually has the habit of inviting everybody he knows just in case. Actually, it happened to coincide with a planned visit to Cambridge, so I said I'd come. And then I had loads of flight delays and missed the last transport connection from the airport and had to get the 5 am bus. So by the evening of that day I hadn't slept in about 40 hours and was absolutely tripping. I went to the party anyway, and had a good if slightly hysterical time. When I left to head back to my parents',

jack sort of ambiguously kissed me goodbye, and I sort of ambiguously wanted to encourage the kissing but was too tired and too surprised to react clearly. Then he sent me text messages trying to clarify and possibly apologize for being clumsy about the kiss, only I had a dumbphone at the time which couldn't cope with texts longer than 160 characters, so I got a broken link to a website that was supposed to allow me to look at "multimedia" messages (ie ones that were longer than a single SMS) but didn't really work. We resolved all this by reverting to email, and agreed that the ambiguous kiss and my ambiguous reaction hadn't been a problem. And that

jack would come to my birthday party at the end of December in the Pembury and we'd talk.

I learned later that he'd left his family Christmas early in order to come to the party, and his mother was most intrigued that there was possibly a Girl. We did in fact talk, and I said I wasn't against seeing if something might develop. There were actually two other people at that party who expressed interest, which was a very weird situation to be in! Plus I was in the middle of my brother trying to set me up with a friend of his, someone I was somewhat interested in but who was really really dithery and unconfident, to the point that he ended up moving to the other side of the world before he got to the point of deciding whether he actually wanted a relationship. At the time my plan was to stay single, having been out of relationships since I broke up with the guy I was dating during my PhD three years before. I wasn't expecting more than a friends with benefits type of arrangement with the other two people who approached me at the party, but I thought I might enjoy some fairly low-key dating with

jack or my brother's friend, or possibly both if the two of them were ok with that. Because I had no idea in my head of a committed relationship, I didn't worry too much about whether

jack ticked all my boxes of what I want in a partner, particularly the fact that he's not Jewish. I thought of him as someone from my broader social circle whose company I enjoyed.

So anyway, we agreed to have an offical Date, which ended up being on New Year's Eve. We sat in the much-lamented Clowns and drank hot chocolate and talked and talked, and didn't really want to stop talking when all the hanging out spots started closing down for New Year. And then I went back to Sweden, and we started writing eachother lots of long emails. At some point

jack logged in to instant messenger, and saw that I'd set a status warning that I was feeling grumpy, and decided to chat to me anyway and cheered me up greatly. We got into the habit of chatting, and in many ways acting like a couple, apart from the fact that we were living in different countries.

At the beginning of February,

jack asked me if he could send me a Valentines' card. I agreed that that would be appropriate, and suddenly he had the inspiration to ask if he could in fact come and visit. I was very touched, though I didn't realize at the time that

jack had never flown or travelled abroad before, so I should have been even more impressed. It's potentially a bit difficult at the very start of a relationship if it involves serious travel, because the visitor might be stranded if things don't work out. We agreed that we wouldn't feel under pressure because of the travel, and we would keep the option open of booking

jack into a hotel if that seemed more comfortable than his staying with me. Then for various reasons the actual Valentines' weekend was impractical, so we agreed to postpone the maybe romantic visit til a couple of weeks later, the weekend of 29^th.

I met

jack from the airport bus with a bunch of flowers, on a night colder than it ever gets in England. And we went back to my flat and had dinner, which was candle-lit mainly because I was lighting candles for Shabbat anyway. We agreed we'd like to be an official couple, and that starting the relationship on Leap Day was a nice thing, so just before midnight I asked

jack out.

And somehow or other that was ten years ago, and we've been married for six of them, and our lives are a very very different shape from 2008. At the time I noted: what's really exceptional is how well we seem to fit together, physically and psychologically.. That is still completely true, and even though ten years ago me would be completely astonished to know that marriage was in our future, I couldn't be happier.