Love Adele Kirby
After the breakup of my first relationship aged 21 I felt very single. I mean I was single, but I had a nagging feeling that I probably should have been romanced for more than seven weeks. Ever. At 25 I was still single and in a cycle of bemusement, despair and curiosity. How was I getting something so natural, so normal, so wrong? Was I missing key emotional programming? Perhaps I had a hormone imbalance? Surely it wasn’t only my unresolvable lack of fashion sense? My sexual preference became a subject of speculation, while I seemed unable to get past a first coffee to confirm either way myself. By 30 I had developed a remarkable talent for falling for men who forgot to mention their current girlfriends, were gay, fictitious, or only wanted to be my friend. From time to time, though not the sharpest tool in the shed, I would realise a guy was displaying interest in me. I just couldn’t feel a damn thing in return beyond friendship. To the disappointment of all involved, my last house warming was a platonic and slightly awkward sausage party.
I began to consider myself a disinterested asexual. Friends, fiction, media and even complete strangers fed me romanticized rubbish about ‘love happening in its own time’, ‘meeting the right person’, ‘you’ll make the time when you want someone’, and how young I was. I had apparently been that young for the last 10 years, while my generation were marrying, baby making and even divorcing. Was I to be assured I was ‘still young’ at 40? It certainly seemed statistically likely I would still be single by then. And my god I didn’t have time for this dating crap. I genuinely considered dating and relationships to be some strange affliction; the work of a cult whose grand masters had neglected to initiate me. However, I was happy, ridiculously busy, independent and had some 2,000 friends on Facebook. So whatever. And then at 31 I met this guy. He met all four criteria for any man who caught my passing interest: straight, single, wanted to be more than my friend and, despite my initial suspicions, real. He was a Danish grand master of Viking voodoo and to my shock I realised. all that bullshit was true.
It was like I had suddenly been admitted into the great conspiracy of love. In weeks, one man effortlessly transformed me from the ‘Relationship Grinch’, to a woman who no longer turned to the Diary of Doom as a reason for being unable to fit dating in, to work out every hour which her date could be fitted. It may have taken its sweet time, but love has happened as promised, in its own time, with me meeting just the right person. The right key to my complicated lock. And what he has taught me is that having a heart with a complicated lock isn’t the same as having a heart with a damaged lock. That had been my fear: that I was broken, unfixable, that the years passed were therefore wasted, as would be those to come. He is worth every year I waited doubled* (*although fortunately not actually doubled, as then I really would be a 40-year-old spinster...) . And now it seems that as a new inductee to the great conspiracy of love, it is my duty to also put forward a decade’s worth of romanticised rubbish to people with equally complicated hearts. I promise you though; complicated is not damaged. The right person will make it worth the wait.