Читать книгу The Bumpy Road to Married Bliss - Chris Dicken - Страница 8

Chris – 1 December 2011

Not much wedding planning has happened yet so, as promised, here’s the story of how this adventure with Donny started.

I met Donny on a gay hiking trip on the Isle of Wight. From the first moment I laid eyes on him I knew he was special. There were two things that initially attracted me to him. The first was his wide, winning smile and the second was his dry, subversive sense of humour, which was always accompanied by a deliciously dirty chuckle. During the first evening of party games, I couldn’t take my eyes off him and hoped that the following two days of walking would give us a chance to spend some time together.

And spend time together we did. In fact, for the first day we spent almost the entire hike chatting together and learning about each other. Sadly, one of the things I learned was that he was going out with someone else. Worse yet, his boyfriend was a high-flying CEO of a software company, and there was no way I was going to be able to compete against that. So I told myself, ‘Oh well, at least I’ve made a new friend.’

The week after the hike I was due to fly to the US on business, so I took the opportunity to drop Donny a message to find out if he wanted me to bring him back anything from his home country. I was expecting just a two- or three-line email in return, but much to my surprise I received a long and involved message detailing all the interesting local foods I should try in the area of the US I was visiting. This initial communication led to an ongoing series of fun (and somewhat flirty) messages back and forth, and also a few social get-togethers in London, which we now refer to as our ‘faux-dates’. He was still seeing this other person at the time, but this didn’t stop us having a great time together and getting to know each other better – but strictly as friends, of course.

It wasn’t until about five months after we met that I invited him down to my house for dinner and an evening of video games. It was about 10 minutes after Donny arrived that he dropped the bombshell that he had broken up with his CEO boyfriend two days earlier. I was dumbstruck! Could this finally be my chance for some new romance? After establishing that he was doing OK, I innocently asked him, ‘So what do you think is a socially acceptable amount of time to wait before I ask you out?’ He then flashed me his megawatt smile and answered cheekily, ‘Oh, I reckon about two days.’

That visit was the start of a four-year journey of discovering more about each other, of falling more in love and embarking on many adventures. What I didn’t think would ever happen, however, was that we would get married. From a very early point in our relationship, Donny had made it clear that he felt marriage was nothing more than a piece of paper and an outdated patriarchal institution. Although I was sad about that, I wasn’t so desperate to be married that I would leave Donny to try to find someone who did prioritise marriage. I felt I was onto a winner – Donny was the best person I had ever met and I just wanted to be with him. Married or not.

And now we are going to get married, I can’t believe it!