We weren’t unhappily married. To most people, I suspect we just seemed … normal. My husband and I had been together for 17 years and had recently celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary. We were plodding along just fine: comfortable, slightly complacent, grunting at each other from behind our phones, eating dinner in front of the telly, focusing on childcare, keeping on keeping on – like most of our married friends. When our mortgage payments doubled, paying for a babysitter to go on nights out alone seemed an unnecessary expense.
On New Year’s Eve, we went to a party at the home of another couple – parents of a child in our son’s class: a bring-kids-along, more-the-merrier thing. I ended up chatting to three women I had never met. They didn’t have children at the school and, it turned out, they were all single – at least one had been hoping there might be eligible men at the party.
Most of us in attendance were fast approaching 50, but this group were about a decade younger, all attractive, successful, funny, intelligent, lively – proper catches. None had been married. They were all on dating apps, while simultaneously despairing of dating apps. I was fascinated. The apps weren’t around when I was last single; I met my husband the old-fashioned way, in real life.
I had known him peripherally through work for years before we got together. We hadn’t seen each other in person for about 18 months before being invited to the same Christmas party in 2007. We both nearly didn’t go, only changing our minds at the last minute. When I saw him across the room that night, it was like a mild electric shock; a jolt, but without the pain. We were together from that evening – from that moment, really. We just felt like a done deal.
The women at the party may have been unlucky, but they hadn’t met anyone they were interested in on the apps. They regaled me with some of the gambits men had sent once they had matched – which made for great anecdotes, but were presumably disappointing, sometimes even upsetting, to receive at the time.
Although I had never used dating apps, I thought I was au fait with what went on – a certain amount of catfishing online followed by an undeniable lack of chemistry in person – but the picture painted here was far bleaker than that. Their stories stayed with me for days. I couldn’t shake the thought that I had quickly forgotten what dating was like.
I was the last of my friendship group to get married. At the time, I felt like the only single person left on Earth, the perpetual gooseberry in a world of happy couples. I longed for a partner – and not just any partner. In fact, the more time it took, the more determined I became not to settle. He had to be kind, funny and smart. Warm, honest, loyal. Someone who would root for me, have my back and be on my team, come what may.
If I could have time-travelled ahead to see who I ended up with, how he was everything I had hoped for and more, early‑30s me wouldn’t have believed her luck. If I could have also seen how, on occasion, I shout at him because of the way he stacks the dishwasher and take him largely for granted, I would have thought myself an idiot.
Talking to the women at new year, who were single not by choice, just as I had once been, didn’t make me glad I had met someone; rather, they renewed my appreciation for my husband specifically. He is far from perfect, as am I, but together we work. We still make each other laugh and our relationship is – always has been – almost effortless. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to put any effort in.
My new year resolutions have been many: turning off the television, putting down my phone and instead really listening to my partner. I make time to kiss him goodbye instead of yelling it from the front door in a rush. We have arranged babysitting swaps with friends in similar boats, so we can go for regular date nights (and, because I’m fortunate enough to be with someone who truly gets me, my husband knows better than to call them that).
I have learned the value of appreciating what you have and protecting something precious, rather than not really acknowledging it because it’s no longer shiny and new.
He is still rubbish at stacking the dishwasher, though.
