I remember the first time I fell in love as if it were yesterday, although its more than thirty years ago now. I had just started a new school, and we were going to our first assembly which was held in a drafty old chapel set in the school grounds. Our school looked very grand, and it had once been a foundling hospital, but although on the surface it looked glamorous it was dilapidated state school, with broken windows and holes in the roof. I sat down on a pew behind a row of boys. I was twelve, and the whole concept of boys as a species mortified me anyway, but worse still one of them caught my eye, and then my heart, in quick succession. I could stop looking at the taller boy sitting in front of me, and noticing the way his hair curled behind ears, that was it. I was smitten.
Well, I wasn’t very good at being a teenage girl, I was quite shy, and sadly absent of any sort of style or elan. I grew a long fringe to hide behind and wore thick glasses long before they were cool. I was quick witted, thought and quite funny, so although I wasn’t exactly popular I got to hang out with the popular kids because I made them laugh. I used to day dream that one day the curly haired boy would whip off my glasses, see the real me and love me back. It never happened though.
During many long years I ever so slowly became good friends with the boy, my unrequited love for him never wavering. It got to be so that I was his trusty sidekick. He’s talked to me about the girls he liked, and sometimes I’d even ask them out for him. And then just before I turned sixteen, something amazing happened. He started to like me back. And I will never forget the moment, when after a school open evening, he walked me home and we kissed for the first time under a street lamp outside my house.
Lots of things happened between the moment I first fell in love, and now, but perhaps the most amazing thing is that in 2010 I married the curly haired boy, thirty years after I first set eyes on him. You never know when the one you meet might be the one.