Dating my wife again
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She means too much to me. Courtesy and consideration for your wife is just as important after the ceremony as it is before. My solo met me around the four month mark. My brother also understands, but disagrees with it entirely. I feel like if we were able to wait at least a year, perhaps the most acute grieving will be behind him. If it is the weight thing that is tout you pause, there are things you can do — not necessarily to lose weight — but to give you confidence. It sounds pretty amazing to me. But still, this is about you more than him.
It was 1977, and I was in love for the first time. At my side, in the driving seat, sat a clever, audacious, adventurous boy of 17. I am nervous, but he seems relaxed, chatting about his bad day at the office, and describing his second home in the country. Out for a spin: In love for the first time. At my side, in the driving seat, sat a clever, audacious, adventurous boy of 17 posed by models Is seeking out your first love ever advisable? I went blundering back into it, taking what I now regard as the regrettable step of revisiting my first love. Tom and I were at school together, bonded by A-level French, a certain academic diligence and big ideas about life beyond the small town where we were growing up. I lived with my family in a small terrace house in town. He and his big, Bohemian family lived in a rambling old manor in the country. There was an orchard, a studio for his mother who was an artist, and the chatter over dinner was of Nietzsche his parents were intellectuals , and the pros and cons of an Oxbridge education. Tom was good-looking, witty and a hero on the rugby pitch. Certainly something of a heart-throb, especially since I was an overweight, swotty Plain Jane who knew more about quantum physics than the opposite sex and romance. We drank lager and blackcurrant in country pubs, and wrote each other florid love letters. I still have mine from him, the prose as purple today as it was then. It was the tail end of the Seventies. He wore flared trousers and Fred Perry shirts, and gave me the album A Star Is Born so we could sing along with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, pretending ours was a doomed, destructive love affair like theirs, rather than the callow teenage liaison it was. And yet, for all its gaucheness, if you had asked me then if I loved Tom, I would have said I did. I holidayed with his family in their pretty cottage by the sea, and Tom and I went on a school exchange trip to northern France, where we got very drunk on Pernod. It was fun, and he was exciting. First kisses: I don¿t suppose I even knew what love was then, but he filled my head and my heart, and memories of our time together remain vivid But we wanted different things from life. My dreams were to get into university, to write for a living and to travel. Tom wanted to be stinking rich, and to own a Ferrari — ambitions I neither understood nor shared. As the pressure of A-levels loomed and the first flush of teenage love cooled slowly into indifference, I suppose I fell out of love with Tom. Besides, a new life beckoned for us both at university later that year, and I had every intention of being footloose and fancy free when I got there. In October that year — 1978 — we left home and started at our respective universities, drifting out of contact as our lives unfolded in new directions. I never forgot Tom, and often wondered what had become of him. He was dating a Yugoslavian model, I heard on the grapevine. He was a millionaire, someone said. We bumped into each other, briefly, in the Nineties. At a school reunion, he introduced me to his wife, and explained they were trying to start a family. Then we lost touch until last year, when I saw his name on an internet forum dedicated to our old school. I contacted him, asking if he would like to meet for a drink next time I was in the city where he now lives. Joys of life: We drank lager and blackcurrant in country pubs, and wrote each other florid love letters Some weeks later, we agreed to meet for dinner. I waited nervously in the restaurant, feeling like the intimidated schoolgirl I had once been. Would I recognise him? Would he recognise me? He was 20 minutes late, which was irritating. I glanced out of the window and noticed an overweight, grey-haired man walking past, sucking hard on a cigarette and looking as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. That same man walked into the restaurant, spotted me and strode towards me. I realised it was Tom. I was stunned at the physical change in him: he was probably 5st heavier than when I had last seen him, carrying a lot of extra weight around his face and his midriff. His hair was grey, and he was sporting a half-baked beard which, I assumed, was there to hide his jowls. The physical change in Tom was the first of many surprises that night. We talked about what had happened to his family in the intervening years. He was wealthy, he mixed with powerful people, and he lived in the most beautiful house in the most prestigious area of his particular suburb. He was married with two daughters, and working in finance. He was materially successful and enjoyed its trappings; exotic Scuba-diving holidays, swanky hotel breaks in the country, three cars on the drive, private schools for his children. But Tom was miserable. He was deeply unhappy in his work, he explained, but needed to earn significant sums of money to keep himself and his family in the style to which they were accustomed. Miserable: I felt so sorry when he explained how he had spent time in The Priory being treated for depression His marriage, he said, had collapsed around the time he had started suffering from depression. He would never divorce her, he said: it would cost him too much. Tom lived a thwarted life, it seemed to me, imprisoned by his wealth. I reflected my life may be relatively unusual, unglamorous and impoverished, but I felt a peace and fulfilment which was lacking in his. I realised we had both got what we wished for all those decades ago — he the riches and the fast car, me the travel and a writing career. We had dinner that night then said goodbye. We should have left it there. Against my better judgment, we did meet next time I was in his area. Tom picked me up from the station in his Ferrari and drove us back to his house. His wife and children were away. We drank champagne, but the mood was fractious. He moaned again about his marriage, his work and his life, and I advised him to start facing up to his problems. Looking back: I should have left my first love where it belonged, firmly in the past, anchored in the memories of who we were then Go to marriage guidance counselling, I suggested. Lose some weight and start looking after yourself physically. Take a year out, sell one of the houses, spend time with your daughters, with your wife, and rebuild your family life. I asked what he meant: predictably, he took the absence of a husband and children in my life as evidence of failure. I think maybe that is what I had hoped for — that the rediscovery of someone so significant in my youth might shine an interesting light on that past and provide the opportunity for a profound new friendship. But I realised I had let curiosity get the better of me. We have not met since that evening last summer, and I have no wish to see Tom, nor hear from him again. I should have left my first love where it belonged, firmly in the past, anchored in the memories of who we were then. Instead, I exhumed my first love, only to give it th e last rites.
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