Dating : Be Careful Who You Kiss When You Are 19

You might marry them when you are 46

I had always felt nerdy and awkward at school, so when I found myself slow dancing with a boy who I considered to be one of the cool kids, I felt very pleased with myself.

And he was about to kiss me.

We were 19 and had left school a year previously. It was the Saturday night before I went to America to be an exchange student. Four days later I flew to Dallas and enrolled as a music major at North Texas State University. I wrote to him and he wrote back. Apparently I never replied, though I don’t remember this. He reminded me of it twenty-one years later.

In those intervening years I became the archetypal single career girl. I came back to the UK after my year abroad, graduated and started working in London. I had the opportunity to be married when I was 22 but I chose not to. He was a lovely man but I had just moved to London and I wanted more of that life before settling down. Little did I know that this would leave me single throughout my 20s and 30s.

I had a lot of fun but it was also tinged with sadness and depression as I watched friends get married and have babies while I seemed incapable of choosing a decent man. Despite diligently practising Buddhism for several years, enlightenment hadn’t delivered me a husband either.

As my 30s ticked by I devoured every personal development book about dating that I could find. Each of these books helped me in some way but I would get frustrated because despite having read them all, I was still single.

In my late 30s, a group of school friends had reconnected via a website called Friends Reunited. (It was a forerunner of Facebook in the UK). We met up for drinks and dinner a couple of times a year. Everyone was in a relationship except for myself and Graham, the person I had smooched all those years previously.

We never mentioned our liaison when we greeted each other for these meetups, but I couldn’t help but think, “I snogged you once” (as we like to say in British English).

Despite being the only singletons, I dismissed him as a potential match because we had led very different lives. He had remained in our home town while I had left at the earliest opportunity and travelled everywhere.

His birthday was in October so he was the first one of us to turn 40 and he was having a party at a local community hall. I had just returned from a Buddhist pilgrimage to Japan where a profound part of self-acceptance at being single had dropped into place. That night I also had an offer to go to a trendy party in a club in London but I had already said yes to Graham’s invite. I had a strong feeling that I needed to be there so I got in my car and headed back home for the weekend.

That day I felt nervous and unwell. At one point in the afternoon I wondered if I should cancel. I struggled to eat my dinner and on the way there I had butterflies in my tummy. With trepidation I walked into the hall. Immediately my friend Kerry, who is a professional singer, came up to me and her first words were, “Hi Cali. Graham wants a wife and you’re top of the list!”

In the past I would have immediately rejected the idea but this time I shrugged and thought, maybe. Later on in the evening Graham, a little worse for wear having had several brandy and cokes, grabbed me for a dance.

As we started to dance he said to me, “Kerry says that she can sing at our wedding.”

“That’s lovely,” I replied, “But don’t you think we should go on a couple of dates first?”

For the first time we spoke about our romantic encounter all those years ago. That’s when he also challenged me that I hadn’t replied to his letter and he had always wondered what had happened to me.

After the party Kerry and my best friend, Helen, both of whom had been close friends with Graham at school, raved about how lovely he was. They described him as an intelligent, thoughtful guy. I became curious about him and over the next few weeks I happily engaged in a flirtatious email exchange with him.

Eventually I grew bored of composing witty emails and just sent him my phone number. Two days later there was a message from him on my voicemail. The next day he called again and asked me out. We arranged to meet at Trafalgar Square on Sunday 11th December at 11am and visit the National Gallery.

As I emerged from the tube exit that day, just before the appointed time, I regretted this decision. Trafalgar Square is huge and has lots of people milling round it. He could be anywhere. Fortunately he was at the foot of Nelsons Column, right in front of the tube exit and walked straight towards me.

We had a fun morning in the gallery grading the paintings with marks out of ten. Constable’s The Haywain was our first work of art to be awarded ten out of ten. After the gallery we walked across Hungerford Bridge to the Southbank and went for lunch.

While we were there, in a manner reminiscent of school relationships, he asked me to be his girlfriend and I said yes. Following lunch, while ambling along the Southbank near Gabriel’s Wharf, we re-enacted our first kiss.

After that date we saw each other the following weekend and then met up again in our home town on Christmas Eve. At that point Graham told me he was surprised at how quickly his feelings for me had strengthened. I wasn’t surprised as I knew that something significant was happening. In Graham I had discovered someone with similar values and interests to myself. He was respectful and very keen to be with me, unlike other men I had dated during the time I that used to call the Bridget Jones years.

Early in the New Year we had an epic two hour long phone conversation. In this conversation we declared our love for each other, realising that we might both have found “the one”. Our relationship continued. We usually saw each other at the weekends as we lived forty miles apart. Eventually I sold my flat in London and moved to Ampthill, a small town near to where we grew up. We set up home there together.

Six years after our first date, also on Sunday 11th December at 11am, we met again at Trafalgar Square. Graham proposed to me and I said yes. We were married ten months later, both aged 46.