Life is a strange but wonderful journey.
Back in January of this year I wrote a blog post entitled “Life Lessons from Personal Mantras” which somewhat explains my perspective on life. Towards the end of the post I wrote:
“Life is like a yellow brick road, there is always a start and inevitably always an end. The paths we wander, the daisy fields of sunshine we pass through, the dark angry storms we encounter are all part of the great adventure that is life.
Along the yellow brick road we will meet many people, some will be lifelong friends, others just passers by. There will be times we take a wrong turn, other times when we feel like we are going around in circles but this is all part of the path we tread, the lessons we need to learn.
Mevagissey Harbour
Christmas 2014:
As was normal then, I met up with my three best friends for a weekend away and, on our first evening together, we sat and chatted about our year. Nothing had really changed for me. I was still working in the same job and, in February 2015, was due to celebrate 30 years in that particular career.
There was no doubt I was finding the job harder and harder. I felt as though I was doing the work of three people for the same money and my role as an “Autonomous Business Manager” was gradually being eroded as Head Office became more involved in daily life and all of us Senior Managers were brought under increasing scrutiny.
I was also going into my 13th year as a single Mum, juggling balls and hoping I didn’t drop one!
Little did I know that my yellow brick road was about to take some major turns.
In February 2015, just after my 30th anniversary, I was put on “garden leave”. It was a huge shock and not exactly the appreciative present I had expected after reaching such a milestone. I remember driving down the motorway to see my friend wondering what on earth I was going to do. I still had a mortgage to pay alongside all the usual everyday bills.
Fast forward to Sunday June 28th. I had secured a very favourable NDA with my previous company, taken some time out and was about to start a brand-new career the following day.
I was getting washed and dressed to go out to dinner with my friend when a message pinged up on my phone. Normally I would have ignored it but, knowing my friend had a tendency to be late, I thought I should check. It transpired it wasn’t a message at all but an email headed, “Hello, how are you?”
Naturally intrigued, I opened it and found a letter from someone I didn’t recognise. Reading it a second time, I realised the letter was definitely addressed to me and signed by someone who seemed to feel he knew me. I had moved a great deal during my career and, over those 30 years, had met hundreds, if not thousands, of people from all walks of life. This guy could be any one of them!
On my third attempt I realised he’d attached a photograph.I clicked on it and up popped a picture of someone I had dated for about 18 months when I was 19. We’d lived in different parts of the country and, while initially meeting every weekend and taking turns to drive from one end of the country to the other, eventually we’d drifted apart.
Unsure what to do, I headed out to meet my friend. Needless to say, I had to tell her about my letter—it was such a shock! Having quizzed me about my previous relationship with him, she persuaded me to contact him when I returned home that night. So I wrote an email back.
He responded the next day and asked if he could call me.
July 4th 2015:
Having chatted non-stop throughout that first week whenever we were both free, we agreed to meet on Saturday July 4th at 1 pm in a town equidistant from each of us.
I remember being so nervous and worrying about whether he would recognise me. I was definitely not the petite size 8/10 I had been back then, plus I was divorced with two children.
He has admitted since that he was equally nervous and actually turned up without his glasses—he hadn’t worn them in our teenage years—because he was worried about first impressions too.
We sat on the riverbank and chatted for hours, breaking for lunch at the pub across the water before returning to our place on the bank. Eventually the sky began to darken and, looking around, we realised it was getting late. In fact, it was 10 pm.
Reluctantly we parted ways, but not before agreeing to meet again for dinner the following Thursday.
The rest, as they say, is history—which leads me onto the actual point of this blog post.
(All the photos were taken by guests at our wedding, this is Mevagissey Harbour)
Preparing for a Midlife Marriage:
For the first two months of our relationship we met every weekend, alternating between houses. It was very reminiscent of our younger relationship, only this time things became serious very quickly.
We spent time relaxing and enjoying ourselves—walks along the river, picnics in the park, takeaways and movie nights—but we also talked. My goodness, did we talk!
We talked about those 30-plus intervening years. The jobs we’d done, relationships we’d attempted and failed at, hobbies, interests and family. You name it, we talked about it. And then we talked about the future.
What did we want? What didn’t we want? Could we actually knit our two lives together?
We were living nearly two hours apart by car. I had been married and divorced, had two children in their late teens and had been a single Mum for thirteen years. He had never married or even lived with anyone, had no children and had lived alone for the previous ten years.
We were two mature adults who had lived lives, made mistakes, learnt lessons and been wounded along the way. Now, somehow, we had found each other again.
It was very different to meeting someone when we were young, when we had little idea of what we wanted or even who we wanted to be. Compromise had been a somewhat alien concept back then and perhaps, like many young people, we’d imagined you simply met, fell in love and lived happily ever after. Age and experience had taught us differently.
Neither of us was prepared to go all in and simply hope for the best. If we were going to do this, we wanted to do it properly.
Three Little Words:
No, not “I love you”, but three words we each wrote down separately to sum up what was most important to us if we were going to move forward with this relationship.
It was a significant moment. Were we really on the same page? Did we value the same things in a relationship? Could this actually work?
He wrote three words with a short sentence explaining why each mattered to him. I simply delivered three words. When we compared our pieces of paper, there they were—the exact same three words:
Honesty Trust Communication
Those three words would become the foundation of our happily ever after.
We’d waited a long time to find each other again. We knew it wouldn’t always be easy, but we also knew that together we could make it work.
Twenty Years:
Two years into our relationship he had moved into my house and we’d started turning it into our home. We redecorated, changed furniture, ripped out the kitchen and turned it into an office/utility area, built a new kitchen in a different room and added a downstairs cloakroom.
He initially continued commuting to his old job before finding a new company closer to home. I left my new career, took what I’d learnt from it and started my own business.
Travelling became a shared passion that we couldn’t get enough of and, together, our life really began to take shape.
Trust had been there from the start. Neither of us ever had a reason not to trust the other.
Honesty was harder. Not because we lied to each other, but because honesty also means being truthful even when you know it isn’t necessarily what the other person wants to hear. We’d had lives before we met and, unsurprisingly, we’d developed very different ways of living them.
His life had been very routine. Mine had to be planned because of my business, but it certainly didn’t run to a strict timetable. The idea of eating dinner at exactly the same time every day was anathema to me, as was going to bed at a set time.
Then there was supermarket shopping. He had to have a certain coffee, a particular type of cheese, the same breakfast every day and specific brands of tomato ketchup and baked beans. Me? I bought whatever was on offer!
These seemingly insignificant differences taught us something important: compromise. A successful relationship isn’t about one person changing to suit the other; it’s about learning when something matters and when it really doesn’t.
Communication was equally important.
If you annoy me, I’ll tell you how I feel—sometimes blatantly honestly. I’ll listen to what you have to say and then, five minutes later, the conversation is over and life goes back to normal. He found expressing his feelings harder and could become defensive or occasionally sulk. That was where those three words came into their own.
You have to tell the other person what you’re thinking and how you’re feeling. A relationship isn’t a game of chess and stalemate doesn’t work.
One of our more serious conversations around this time concerned our health. We were both overweight. We didn’t exercise much and, although neither of us had any ailments or took medication, we knew we needed to lose weight and become fitter.
Following several conversations, we made a commitment to each other:
“Let’s have twenty years together to enjoy ourselves, be happy and healthy.”
We had already led an alcohol-free life for nearly 15 years and I had given up caffeine at the Millennium. We’d given up takeaways in January 2016.
In January 2017 we gave up processed food and began cooking our meals from scratch. We started walking regularly—initially managing just two miles before gradually increasing the distance until we walked the Sharpness to Gloucester Canal, a total of 16 miles across two days.
I also joined the gym and, after trying a variety of classes, eventually settled into attending three to five classes a week. We both lost weight. He is now almost at his ideal weight. I still have more to lose.
July 4th 2020:
This was supposed to be our wedding day. We had been together for five years and July 4th fell on a Saturday. Everything was organised.
Rather than traditional invitations, we’d designed a brochure featuring a photograph of our venue on the cover.
We had chosen to marry in Cornwall at a beautiful Victorian mansion built in 1892, perched high on a clifftop on Tregoney Hill with panoramic views over the historic fishing harbour of Mevagissey and the rugged Cornish coastline.
It was going to be a four-day celebration for just 22 close friends and family. Inside our full-colour brochure were details of everything from Friday’s teatime arrival through to breakfast and departure on Monday.
There was just one thing we hadn’t planned for -COVID!
Communication had helped us create the wedding of our dreams and communication got us through the disappointment of having to postpone it. Our special date was no longer available, but we knew how to talk to each other, how to discuss difficult things and how to make the best of what felt, at the time, like an awful situation.
When it rained for most of what should have been our wedding weekend, we sat beside the river where we’d first met five years earlier, enjoyed a beautiful picnic and toasted our new wedding date: June 17th 2021.
July 9th 2022:
Our second wedding date was also postponed as Covid lingered on and, once again, we watched the rain fall on June 17th while pondering the fact that we had to wait yet another year.
When our wedding weekend finally arrived in July 2022, the sun shone and everything went to plan. We hired a private chef so we didn’t have to worry about food. Our florist created the most beautiful natural displays, based upon our colour theme and grown in her garden, for the outside pagoda and tables, along with our bouquets and buttonholes.
Even our three-tiered, heart-shaped chocolate wedding cake had survived a saga of its own after two previous cake makers had cancelled along the way. Somehow, after all those postponements and changes, the final version turned out to be the best of the lot.
Perhaps one of the greatest advantages of getting married later in life was that we felt absolutely no pressure to make our wedding conform to anyone else’s idea of what it should be. There were no parents dictating who should attend or how things should be done.
We didn’t make speeches and we didn’t have a photographer, opting instead for my son’s best friend to make a video of the whole weekend. We wrote our own vows, created our own musical playlists and organised games for the Friday and Sunday evenings. Following our vows on Saturday we had a traditional sit-down afternoon tea, relaxed around the pool later in the afternoon and finished the day with an outdoor BBQ, music and dancing.
It wasn’t about impressing anyone or ticking boxes on a list of wedding traditions. Perhaps that confidence comes with age too. We knew who we were, we knew what mattered to us and, most importantly, we knew who we wanted around us.
We couldn’t have wanted anything more.
It was perfect.
Every anniversary, wherever we happen to be, we sit in front of a TV and plug in the video. We smile as we listen to the tears of our special friends and family who were completely overcome by the ceremony and watch the smiles on everyone’s faces as my two children entertain them with songs that remind me of my days as a single Mum.
Eleven Years and Counting:
Time rushes past so quickly and here we are, eleven years in, four years married and twelve years left of those twenty years we hoped to have together.
Final Thoughts
Falling in love and getting married later in life is very different to doing it when you’re young. We came into our relationship with history, baggage, established habits and a few scars collected along the way. But we also came into it knowing ourselves rather better than we had thirty years earlier.
Perhaps that’s one of the advantages of a midlife marriage. You’ve lived enough life to know that happily ever after doesn’t simply happen. It takes honesty, trust, communication and, occasionally, compromise over something as mundane as a brand of baked beans!
Would our relationship have worked if we’d stayed together when we were 19? Who knows. Maybe we needed those thirty years apart to become the people who were eventually ready for each other.
Eleven years later, we’re still travelling along that yellow brick road together—and I’m rather glad it took that unexpected turn.
Have you found love or married later in life? I’d love to hear whether you think age and experience changed your approach to relationships. As always, if you’ve enjoyed reading, please leave a comment or a like and subscribe to follow the next chapter of our midlife adventure.
