The Wedding Story

So what happened?

One day I fell in love. I found happiness. I found bliss. Somewhere in my mid-thirties, I fell in love with a younger man who showed me that life doesn’t always have to be a lonely struggle. So I lay down my fighting stick, deciding it was time to stop surviving and start living. I peeled back the tough exoskeleton of a self-made woman and opened up my heart. Perhaps it was luck, we found each other and instantly recognized one another. For me, it’s been a long and windy journey to learn and understand Love. For my man, the experience has been more linear.

Two years ago, I completed a university degree in Melbourne and was about to return to Europe, where I’d been living and working for the past years. During the preparation for the big move, one March afternoon, I found myself in the accessories department at David Jones. In all the years I’d lived in Melbourne, I had never shopped at David Jones. But that day, in the accessories section on the ground floor, dazzled by all the lights reflecting off the brass fixtures and mirrors, l had an epiphany. I looked at the rows of designer perfumes, the cosmetic counters, the pyramids of velvet makeup cases stacked on tables covered in cloth, the sable makeup brushes and leather clutch bags and fashion jewellery glinting in the glass showcases. Suddenly I felt dizzy and then I knew: it was time to allow myself to give in to all this glitz. My days of second-hand clothing stores and discount moisturizers were over. No more sensible underwear or politically correct blush for me. Here, in David Jones, I was experiencing the dawn of a new era. Goodbye aromatherapy oils, hello French perfume! It was time to experience the luxury of the superfluous, to enjoy abundance and to allow myself a leg wax. I was going to be a new woman and from now on, I was never dating a guy again who wouldn’t hold a door open for me. After all, I’d done my fair share of keeping doors open for men, and nothing good ever came of that.

We met two weeks later at my going away party and it was love at first sight. When the young, handsome man showed up at my formal going-away dinner at Morgan’s on the beach, my friends all thought I’d lost my mind. But six months later he came to Europe, and we’ve been together ever since.