diary of an army girlfriend words: lydia willgress
After internet dating, drinks with guys met in clubs, screwing around with men from my office (never really advisable, though it was fun at the time), I never imagined myself finding ‘the one.’ Imagine my surprise when I did fall in love and eventually marry a man who’s become my best friend. This journey has scared me something rotten. You see I married one of my brother’s friends. He was my schoolgirl crush.
love, actually. words: danielle graph Growing up, I never believed in love. Falling in love seemed impossible. I came from a household where my parents loathed each other. All they did was argue and scream. To be heard in our house, you had to be able to shout, loudly. Don’t get me wrong, I was loved by my parents and it was a loving household, but there was never any togetherness between them. No partnership, no camaraderie, just two people who never had the balls to get up and leave. I’m assuming this is why I didn’t believe in marriage in my teens and twenties. I guess I just never wanted to end up like my folks: bitter, twisted and stuck. I remember I used to go to my school friends’ houses, just to be near their parents because they got on. They did stuff together and, for me, it was a fabulous novelty. I’d watch in awe at how they’d chat and treat each other with respect, it was so alien!
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GET TROOPS OUT OF AFGHANISTAN NOW. UK SOLDIER KILLED IN AFGHANISTAN ‘INSIDER ATTACK.’ BRITISH SOLDIER KILLED BY AFGHAN COLLEAGUE.
We’d only been dating a month when I came home to find a bunch of flowers from him, with a card saying ‘Here’s to the next month.’ I remember crying to my mum, ‘Oh shit this is it. This is the one I’m going to marry. I’m terrified’ and she told me just to go with it, let it roll out. Then she told me how lucky I was to be in love, as she had never had the real thing. (My parents married because my mum was naive and my dad was devilishly handsome. They looked beautiful together).
I blinked. The wine was still in my hand, the candle on the table. He sat across from me, perfectly composed, waiting for an answer. A week ago we had met. 2012 had not been good year for me so far. I had learnt, through a series of unfortunate (albeit possibly predictable) events, that sometimes in life you were going to be given lemons. Head down, I spent four months working hard (aside from the occasional drunken escapade) and ignoring all other aspects of life. It quickly became April and I travelled South on the obligatory nine hour train ride home.
And as it turns out, my then boyfriend (now husband) and I were head over heels. I didn’t know how to cope with it. This overwhelming emotion was like they describe in the movies: it swept me off my feet. I became rubbish at my job, I couldn’t eat, I lost a load of weight. Bonus! In my house now, there’s very little shouting. If on the rare occasion I do argue with my husband (and to be fair, I’m probably the instigator), I immediately start shouting; it’s like an automatic function. But he reminds me to just talk. He’s got my back. He’s the ying to my yang, the left to my right, and more of these rubbish clichés.
It’s worth mentioning that life at home is far from exciting. When I’m not in Edinburgh drinking Sambuca on a ‘quiet’ Tuesday night or spending days cramming in a student-filled library, I live a relatively normal life in a quiet Devonshire village. I spend my time pulling
And it still surprises me to this day that I found true love. After never having believed in it for so long, finding it is pretty much winning the lottery. OK, I’m being a bit over zealous there, because that’s the ultimate dream, but it’s still pretty darn tooting amazing. Danielle Graph is the TV and Reviews Editor at Nuts magazine and regularly contributes to xojane.co.uk
endless pints of ale and discussing how bad the roads will be when the tourists decide to descend on Devon. However, this Saturday night was different. It was Easter Saturday, not that this is a particularly useful bit of information – my night wasn’t spectacular because I was filled with joy at the prospect of waking up with a slightly-dented, hollow ball of chocolate at the foot of my bed. Indeed, the ‘Easter Bunny’ will have undoubtedly already arrived and gone by the time I will crawl into bed. No, my night was different because there was a new person at work. And he was male. I should probably explain my excitement. I am by no means surprised by the idea of men. I am not a girly-girl who giggles, blushes and practically faints at the idea of a member of the other gender being in my general vicinity. However, after seven-years of working in a village pub where only girls are hired as waitresses, the prospect of something a bit better to look at was undeniably a good one.
He definitely fulfilled expectations. Attractive, intelligent, charismatic. A genuinely lovely person with dreams as big as my own and a way of making me smile like no one else. Every cliché I can think of would be appropriate to describe that first night. A week later, we were on our first date. It was then that he told me that he would be going into the army to become a pilot. It was then that I found myself remembering every headline I’d seen about the troubles in Afghanistan. Having had no experience of friends or family going into the forces, I could only imagine the bad: the stories that a girl who wants to be a journalist reads every day. It would have been easy to give up. Eight months later and I don’t know how I ever felt like that. Like every other 20-year old girl who has fallen in love, there have been ups and downs. The lack of contact is sometimes painful, but I know that he is achieving his dream, as I am by writing this story. Every day it gets a bit easier and sometimes being scared leads to the greatest decisions of all. For more insights into the life of an army girlfriend, follow @WillgressLydia
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