Your loving mother,

Mum

22

Less than a week after he first asked me to marry him, Aidan did it again, this time with a ring, made by a jeweler I’d once said I liked. In white gold with a delicate band and seven diamonds in a star setting, it was a very nice ring and I was very freaked out.

“Snap out of it,” I said to him. “Take it down a notch or two. We had one bad weekend, you’re overreacting.”

I hurried home to Jacqui and related what had happened.

“A ring?” she exclaimed. “You’re getting married!”

“I’m not getting married.”

“Why not?”

“Why should I?”

“Duh…because he asked you?” Testily, she said, “It was a joke. Sort of. So why won’t you marry the guy?”

Incoherently, I spluttered, “Reason (a) I barely know him and I’ve spent so much of my life being impulsive, I’ve used it all up. Reason (b) Aidan has too much baggage and I don’t want a fixer-upper. Reason (c) As you yourself, Jacqui Staniforth, said—and I bet you’re right—he’s probably a hard dog to keep on the porch. What if he’s unfaithful to me?”

“Actually, it’s none of the above,” Jacqui said. “It’s reason (d) Because you’re a late starter. Which means,” she said loudly, “that while every other single woman of our age would be delighted to marry anyone, even a three-eyed dwarf who has to shave his nose, you’re still naive enough to think you shouldn’t go round marrying the first man who asks you. Yes, you barely know him! Yes, he’s got baggage! Yes, he might have trouble keeping his lad in his pants! But basically, Anna Walsh, you haven’t a fucking CLUE how lucky you are!”

I waited for her to finish shouting.

“Sorry,” she said, her color high, her breathing louder than usual. “Got a little…overexcited there. I’m really sorry, Anna. Just because he has only two eyes and is of average height and nose-hairiness for his age, is no reason to marry a man. Not at all.”

“Thank you.”

“But you do love him,” she accused. “And he loves you. I know it’s been quick, but it’s serious.”

The next time he produced the ring I said, “Please stop.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Why do you want to marry me?”

He sighed. “I can list the reasons but it still won’t convey anything like enough: you smell good, you’re brave, you like Dogly, you’re funny, you’re smart, you’re really, really cute-looking, I like the way you say ‘curly-wurly,’ I like how your head works, how we can be talking about FedExing my Mom’s birthday gift to Boston and you suddenly say, ‘It’s impossible for someone to look sexy while licking a stamp’…” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “But it’s much, much more than that. Like much, much, much, much more than that.”

“What’s the difference between how you feel about me and how you felt about Janie?”

“I’m not dissing Janie, because she’s a great person, but there’s no comparison…” He snapped his fingers. “Okay, got it! Have you ever had, like, a really bad toothache? One of those screaming ones where it’s like electricity crackling up into your head and ears, it’s so bad you can nearly see it? Yeah? Okay, convert that same intensity into love and that’s how I feel about you.”

“And Janie?”

“Janie? Janie is like when you bump your head on a low ceiling. Bad but not unbearable. Am I making any sense?”

“Strangely, yes.”

Obviously, I’d known the first time we’d met that there had been something, some connection. Then, accidentally bumping into each other seven weeks later looked like a “sign” that we were meant to be together, but I didn’t want to live my life by “signs,” I wanted to live them by facts.

Fact 1. I couldn’t deny that he’d severely disrupted my peace of mind; despite my insisting that we barely knew each other, privately I felt that we knew each other extremely well. In a good way.

Fact 2. It was different from the way I’d felt about any man in a long, long time. I suspected—feared even—that I was badly in love with him.

Fact 3. I valued loyalty and in many ways Aidan was extremely loyal: he embraced Jacqui, Rachel, even Luke and the Real Men, calling them “man” just to fit in. He celebrated my work victories and he’d hated Lauryn long before he met her.

Fact 4. I wasn’t going to get sidetracked by the physical side of things, because you can fancy anyone. But, as it happened—and it’s really neither here nor there—we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.

On paper so many of the boxes were ticked. The problem was Janie. I couldn’t forgive Aidan for dumping her.

But when I took my woes to Jacqui, she said, “He dumped her for you!”

“It still feels wrong. And he was with her for a thousand years, he only knows me five minutes.”

“Listen,” she said earnestly. “Really listen to me. You often hear of people who go out with someone for years and years, then they break up and two days later they’re getting married to someone else. We’ve seen it, haven’t we? Remember Faith and Hal? She broke it off with him after eleven years and immediately—so it seemed—he married that Swedish girl and everyone said, ‘There goes the rebound kid,’ but they’re still together and they’ve three children and they seem happy. When people move that fast, everyone says, ‘I’ll give it a month,’ but often they’re wrong, often it works. And I’ve a feeling that’s what’s going on here. You don’t have to be with a person for a hundred years before you’re sure. Sometimes it happens in an instant. You’ve heard the saying: ‘When you know, you know.’”

I nodded. Yes, I’d heard it.

“So do you know?”

“No.”

She sighed heavily and muttered, “Christ.”

In all the time I was with Janie,” Aidan said, “I never asked her to marry me. And she never asked me either.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m freaked out enough, having such an intense relationship with you so quickly, but all this marriage stuff is really doing my head in.”