The Dating Game

J and I have been together for almost six years. We have almost three children. We have history and stories and anecdotes. It’s good. Things are really good.

I don’t miss dating at all. I never read about a single person with envy, or listen to a dating story with anything even approaching jealousy, dating is hard and gruelling and, if not predominantly devastating, then at least a little bit so. You get your hopes up and are let down, you think that things are progressing when the other person doesn’t agree, it’s basically a roller-coaster. But then it suddenly isn’t, and your second date becomes your sixth and then your tenth and then you’re not counting anymore and it’s just ‘us’.

I have never been more grateful that I am part of an ‘us’.

I was dumped fairly spectacularly in the spring of 2011, just before Prince William got married. That seems like a very random way to remember when but I can still remember almost every moment of that wedding as if I’m watching it again and again on a loop. Funny how your brain works. That was the relationship that I thought was it. Spoiler alert: it was not. Laughably not. But I was newly thirty one and it felt like the world was ending. I dated, some good, some bad, some curtailed by me walking out, one ended with an obscenely inappropriate text message. I used to date in bursts, perhaps two or three in a fortnight, then a lull when it all seemed hopeless, then feeling better and attempting it again.

J and I met on the 29th February 2012. A leap year. He had spent the day at a farm with a friend he went walking with and I had worked. I was late, forgetting that I have a hopeless sense of direction and had no idea that Bexhill had a ringroad, and he was waiting for me, sitting on a wall as I hurriedly changed into heels in the front seat of my car. I can remember bits of what we talked about, but I can remember what he looked like, what he was wearing, I can remember walking back to my car to drop him home, our hands swinging, almost nearly touching. He kissed me outside his house and that was that.

We have been through some things since then, some that people know about and some that will remain between us, some glorious things, the birth of our beautiful girls being chief amongst them and some lows, constant nagging money worries and I think one of the worries that most couples have, particularly those with small children, that of remaining a couple that love each other away from their kids.

I don’t know that we’ll be together forever, who can possibly know that, but we plan as if we will be. I have stopped worrying about it as much as I used to. When we first bought a car together, a long time ago now, I wondered vaguely as to who would get it if we broke up, knowing what it was like to split a house in the event of a break-up. We’re not married, I’d like to, but not as much as his mother would like us to, he’s not fussed. We might one day, I’d really like the same surname as my children, and I’d love to call him my husband. He is my husband though in every way that it matters and that is enough, a piece of paper won’t cement us any more than our children have.

He is the love of my life whether we are together for the next year or the next fifty. He deserves that title, for the person he is and the person he has allowed me to be. Myself. He accepts me entirely for who I am, he makes me laugh until I cry and he is the most wonderful father. I crave time with him, time without our girls, and yet I’m happiest when it’s the four of us, curled together watching Paw Patrol before bed.

The dating game. It’s not for me.