Friday December 2: 8 Years Ago Today

Already married 2 yrs we have a wedding

Memory is a funny thing.   When I think back about the days that ended up changing the course of my life, I get incredibly anxious.  Even though at the time, when events were happening I felt fine....

Which is a slightly odd way of introducing this story.

Eight years ago today, I agreed to meet R for a quick coffee at the Tate Modern.  At this point, we'd met seven times in person (two of these were random run ins at parties).  I was in town for my mother's 50th, and so far, in the manner of every Richard Curtis holiday rom com ever made,  we had only crossed signals, backstories involving friends who were exes's, exe's who were friends and so on.

The grudging coffee became champagne (pink! vintage!) at his house (day time drinks figure largely in pivotal moments in my life, coincidence? or cause? something to figure out later).

The first bottle turned into the second and somewhere along the line we decided instead of dating, we would get engaged.  So out we went out to quickly get a ring before stores closed (which led R's banker to call him and ask what was happening because the transaction was deemed "out of the ordinary").  The next step?  Telling my parents. They had never heard of Rana before, thought I was dating someone else (details) and so were predictably stunned (understatement).

Memory is also funny because in the re-telling of our stories, details and narratives naturally shift, and then change how we perceived the events.

In my case, our personal story became one of the hooks used to promote my last book.

I didn't always like or agree with the hows and angles, but I went with it - since if you publish a relationship book at 32 with no real relationship credentials, your own story becomes fair game.

The first question was always: since I had written about arranged marriages, had I had one?

So, as advised by my publicist, I would diligently launch into explaining that no, although we got engaged after seven meetings, our parents were in no way involved and in fact, our families didn't meet for months after.

The getting engaged after seven dates is a media grabber particularly since many of journalists I was speaking with were single women who loved the idea that in a day, your whole life could completely change like this.

And although the decision sounds astonishingly impulsive, lost in the "public" story is that we had been exchanging emails for months.

London Engagement Party 

These weren't explicably "romantic" but they did set up the scene....

For instance,  after a night out, I once sent R several revisions of the same email (each one slightly edited to improve the casual but i hoped flirty tone and voice).

Also lost in my public telling of the story, was that although we didn't "date" we did meet for one weekend in Ottawa for the 80th birthday party of John Meisel, a wonderful man - (but still an odd first date, no?) R's idea, not mine.

 Three months later I moved to London. Four months later we got legally married.

In the months that followed, I would often experience the onset of a horrible delayed anxiety: I could have missed this, that it all could have so easily gone some other way, with someone else, in some other place.

My brother would say that our lives have all been written, I'm not sure about that... but, today, I'm glad it worked the way it did and deep thoughts aside, I'm just looking forward to a spa day tomorrow, with some chilled champagne and courtesy of my wonderful sister-in-law - a child free night.../rs