The Journey of Love and Hope: Ivf from a Bloke's Point of View

By Robert Forde

After eighteen years of devout, okay, unwilling bachelorhood, Robert Forde finally met Iona, the woman of his dreams. With a great job and a perfect wife what could possibly go wrong? Fate, of course, was more than happy to answer that stupid question.

Life was going swimmingly until the time arrived to start planning a family but little did Robert or Iona realise just what lay ahead for them both.

Against a backdrop of the credit crunch, union strikes and erupting volcanoes they find themselves entering the incredible world of in-vitro fertilisation. Along the way they have to struggle against hideous bureaucracy, terrible incompetence and all those nasty little surprises that life can throw up as well as those quirky incidents you simply cannot make up!

The Journey of Love and Hope is the story of a book. It is a very particular book of which but a single copy exists and which is aimed at a very exclusive audience. It is the account that Rob Forde wrote for his child-to-be explaining not only the motivations that drove him and Iona on but the struggles they had to endure in their quest to have a child.

It is a message through time, a record of events to a very special person, a book which may never be read written for a child who may never come into existence.

The Journey of Love and Hope is a fascinating bitter-sweet insight into IVF, written from the point of view of just your regular kind of bloke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Aug 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477219492

Robert Forde

Robert Forde is a pretty average kind of guy who in normal life is a packaging engineer at a major fast moving consumer goods multinational. He currently lives with his family in Dorset which is far preferable to the alternatives that recent life has offered. Having never gone out of his way to be an author he was inspired to write “The Journey of Love and Hope” after the experiences he and his wife Iona went through as they embarked on the convoluted process of IVF.

Book preview

Chapter 1:

Sorry, who are you..?

This is a book about a book. In that respect, this story is not in the least unique but the book in question, well that is. You will not find this particular work on any bookshop shelf, it graces the stacks of no library and nowhere on its cover will you find even the hint of an ISBN. It is a book of which but a single copy exists, a volume which was aimed at a readership of one, very particular person who, as you will realise as you read on, may not even exist.

What could this book be, you may well ask? At this stage, all I will tell you is the title which by now you have probably guessed is The Journey of Love and Hope.

This is the story of the events that lead to the inception of this unique work of literature, a tale of true events but with one very specific aim. It is the story of the journey that my wife and I undertook over the last few years but that journey was an emotional rather than a physical one.

I am, however, getting far ahead of myself for in order to tell the story of the book I should give you at least some idea of who I am so as to put things in context.

My name is Robert Forde. Again that should not be a great surprise to you as it is written all over the cover and thus a bit of a give-away. To be literally correct my name is Robert David Forde and it has been pointed out to me on numerous occasions that this shortens to Rob Da Forde and would make a particularly good rap name, especially in Detroit.

If you could meet me you would realise that I am about as likely to grab a microphone and start talking quickly in that monotone common amongst stars of that particular genre of music as I am to become an Olympic high jumper. Haling as I do from Oxfordshire I was blessed (or cursed) with a slightly posh voice despite the fact that I am, like my parents before me, devoutly middle-class.

Robert Forde was not blessed with the physique of a Greek god and the only six-pack I possess is the metallic form filled with Belgian lager, one of which is providing moral support as we speak. If it is true that within every fat person there is a thin person trying to escape then I have been guilty of false imprisonment for many years. Robert Forde was built for comfort, not for speed. I don’t use the excuse that I am big boned or have a stocky build. I just eat too much. At least I am not self-deluded like many others I have met.

Fortunately, Rob Da Forde is not a moniker I have been endowed with, though there are those that call me Harry for equally unlikely reasons.

It was one of those passing moments, back in my student days, that were in hindsight, inevitably going to follow me for the rest of my life. It was the day of the last of my final exams; fortunately a morning affair and a group of my fellow packaging students had decided to undertake the eight pint challenge at the Brewer’s Arms, our local watering hole.

The lounge bar of this classic student haunt is equipped with eight pumps. On the left there is a popular brand of stout, followed by three real ales that are staples of the pub’s drinks menu followed by two guest ales that vary on a monthly basis, a strong foreign lager and finally a good old-fashioned scrumpy cider of the sort that long-term exposure to will impair your eyesight.

As challenges go it was not a particularly difficult one, the rules as far as there were any were very simple, you started at one end of the bar and had a pint from each pump in order until you reached the other end and you had to do so by the end of lunchtime drinking.

This was, of course, back in the days prior to all-day opening when some pubs actually closed for a few hours in the afternoon to wring out the carpets so that you were forced to down your eight pints in, by the time the exam was over, what amounted to around ninety minutes (just over eleven minutes per pint).

You only had one choice and that was simple: which end of the bar did you start i.e. did you go left to right or right to left or, more importantly, did you start on the stout and finish on the scrumpy or vice-versa?

I will not bore you with the aftermath of this session which, by the way, did not include anything sensible like lunch but the drinking was interspersed with such imaginative games as who can belly dance the quickest, who can belch the word ‘bollocks’ in the most convincing way and, pertinent to my good self, who is the person least likely to be mistaken for Harrison Ford?

Needless to say I won both by virtue of physically being the person most suited to the role but also with my surname the result was inevitable. By the back-straight of the bar Harrison had been shortened to Harry and by last orders the nick-name had stuck.

People still call me that today though few either know or remember why. I just hope the actor who I hold in high regard never finds out he has been compared to someone with the appearance (but not the strength) of a moderately bored mountain gorilla.

I am not putting myself down, the fact was and to an extent remains that I am on the larger side but I blame nobody but myself. I love my food and detest exercise which is a recipe for disaster or at least obesity. Boredom and loneliness paid more than their part to result in the portly person I now am.

The only reason I mention it as I wanted to begin to paint a picture of Rob Da Forde, rapper to the rotund.

I have alluded to the fact that I went to university and in that respect regard myself as fortunate, especially in the economic climate of the twenty-first century where jobs are scarce and every educational advantage is worth its weight in gold.

My chosen subject was packaging engineering which you may frown at, this not being one of the regular degree subjects that most people seek but is perhaps one of the most crucial.

If you consider just about everything you purchase, from food to furniture, it usually comes packaged in some kind of outer carton, bag, box or blister pack. These things don’t grow on trees (okay, technically the wood pulp in the cardboard does grow on trees but the finished folding corrugated carton does not) and it is the job of the unsung packaging engineers and packaging designers to come up with that mountain of surplus material that you so casually throw into the recycling bin.

To put it another way, I design boxes. This is a terribly simplistic view but I have found myself in all too many social occasions where I begin to explain what it is that I do only to be faced with what is becoming a familiar glazed expression. Rather than bore the pants off of whichever unfortunate soul had asked the question I usually revert to I design boxes as a quick summary of what is in fact a very complex and interesting (at least to me) subject.

As careers go, it is okay if you like that sort of thing and certainly beats hearing the continual beep of the bar code scanner or having to constantly utter the mantra do you want fries with that?. This is not that either is a bad thing, you understand, but packaging engineering certainly pays better and you don’t have to work weekends.

On the flip side, I am not curing cancer and arguably rather than saving the world I am contributing to its accelerated demise though in my opinion it is not the world that is in trouble, it is just us! Planet Earth will get along just fine with or without us. In my defence a lot of my undergraduate dissertation work was looking at the subject of secondary uses for primary packaging – finding some other function for it rather than just throwing it away – something that is still close to my heart.

So what does this have to do with anything? Honestly, not much but that is precisely the point. If you wind back the clock twenty years you will see that long-departed younger version of me embracing life at a moderate pace but wallowing in a sea of loneliness, longing and lager, unaware of just how long he would have to wait until that side of his life began to sort itself out.

Robert Forde was, as now, totally unremarkable, one of the millions of anonymous faces in the crowd. Where I had glances at all it was usually from women looking at me with mild but passing revulsion that I was on the portly side but I knew that the memory of me would be as transient in their minds as a snowflake on a sunny day.

Despite attempts to the contrary I find that I cannot generate much of an interest in sport and while I am not particularly into computer games I do like science fiction, a social Achilles heel that probably did not do me any favours (sorry Colin!).

While at the time I felt a sense of great isolation, looking back I realise that the problems I felt were uniquely mine, an inability to find a girlfriend being top of the list, were sadly all too common in society, not that I could see this as I wallowed in the warm mud of self-pity.

It is like the check-out queue at the supermarket. You always feel as if you manage to pick the line that moves slowest only because you only remember those annoying times when the queues either side of you race past as the little old lady in front of you helpfully finds the correct change for her shopping from the deepest recesses of her handbag while telling the check-out girl her entire family history.

Major economies have risen and fallen faster than people like her can find that last elusive penny, made more annoying as they are genuinely doing it to be helpful when in fact simply handing over a tenner and getting the change would have been much faster and the store probably counts its change by the tonne.

The human brain doesn’t record those times when you stood in line and were served in good time while lost in your own thoughts.

It is the same with friends. You always dwell on those smug men into whose arms women seem to throw themselves no matter how badly they behave, not recognising that for every one of those you probably know half a dozen others who are finding the whole process of attracting a mate as baffling as yourself.

And so it was. Robert Forde or Robert the not-so-great as I used to call myself entered the world of men with a relatively good education (a scraped upper second class degree) a fair bit of excess weight and near-terminal loneliness. It passed almost unnoticed that I managed to walk into a good job in a multinational company – let’s just put it this way, at some point you have unwrapped and eaten something that was made by my former employees unless you have serious dietary restrictions.

Even in those days, the beginning of the 1990’s, the job market was in decline but it was a measure of my self-absorbed and self-indulgent moaning that I did not appreciate that in fact I was fortunate that at least the employment side of things was ticking along nicely. This was only partly due to my natural abilities, it has to be said. Where I was fortunate was to work with a very select group of mentors who had far more belief in my abilities than I did and kept my career on the straight and narrow while I was nowhere near the tiller of my own boat.

Friends and family alike gave me the same condescending (if annoyingly true) advice that there was someone out there for me and that it would happen someday. This advice normally came from people within relationships rather than single guys so I rarely gave it credence and as to the advice that I should lose weight, well that went in one ear and out the other. Eating was pretty much all I had.

It was not that I was self-deluded in terms of my size but simply that eating is an addiction just like smoking and was something I had to deal with in my own way but that is another story.

And so it was that Robert Forde plodded along, living from one year to the next in the increasingly forlorn hope that Miss Right would sweep into his life.

Do not, by the way, feel in any way sorry for Rob the younger. I look back on that period of life with little more than acute embarrassment and I have nothing but heartfelt thanks for my friends and family who put up with my eternal whinging for so long.

Little did I know, however, that not a million miles away, a rather attractive young lady was herself just emerging from teaching college and feeing just the same as me.

The years rolled by as did some of the most pivotal decisions in my career, not that I realised at the time just what the significance of my choices were. We all follow a path in life and every now and then meet a crossroads where a simple decision will decide the whole course of our future destinies.

Some people reach these junctions and pause, deliberating carefully what they should do while others stride confidently down their chosen route, comfortable with their ability to always know what is best.

I think I managed to pass just about all of my crossroad markers with my head down (or up my own arse as some might suggest) such that I probably even now could not tell you when they all happened. I treated them in the same way as I would selecting a menu choice at my local curry house, it depended on what I fancied on the spot regardless of the effect it would have on me in the morning.

In some respects it was the joy of being a bachelor, with only myself to look after, not that I was doing such a grand job of that, it really didn’t matter too much what I did so long as I stayed employed and was able to fund my sedentary lifestyle.

For that reason, my career was something that seemed to happen despite me and around me rather than with any conscious effort on my part. Looking back I realise what happy carefree times they were but more on that later. If I knew then what I know now about what a nasty place the world really is I might have taken my choices more seriously.

Needless to say, after a decade of wrapping the kind of snack products I liked to consume (and having access to a company store which was really not conducive to dieting) I jumped ship to a packaging consultancy more so I could move back to my native Oxford than any other reason. Living up north as my first job had required really did not suit me, being the devout southern shandy that I am as my old colleagues fondly called me.

There is one thing to be said about most multinational companies, they are not based in exciting places whereas being back among the alleys and spires of Oxford was a breath of fresh air.

The pivotal first job I had landed had been placed in what is often noted as one of the most built-up places in the country where you were never more than a few miles from a motorway and the constant buzz of traffic was unavoidable.

My undergraduate days had been spent at a much lesser university far from the comfort zone of home but the fact was there was never any real danger of my qualifying for Oxford. When it comes to academia I was always economical with my time and effort, doing just enough to pass relatively well rather than excel. I was not Oxford material even though Oxford ran through my veins.

With my thirtieth birthday long gone the deeply gnawing angst that I was going to remain single had subsided to a bitter inevitability. All of my friends by now were happily wed and progressing to the stinky nappy stage whereas I had been left far behind and nobody really thought that I would sort myself out.

I was neither surprised or in any way hurt when this resulted in my once best buddies suddenly becoming rather vague and distant as the focus of their life shifted to their new family commitments.

I could not understand what they were doing but I did accept it, all the while my heart fracturing even further at the sense of loss that I was not going to experience even the smallest part of what they were now enjoying every day.

In twenty years the longest I had managed to go out with anybody was three months and that was only because when I asked her out she had been too embarrassed to say no and it had taken me that long to realise.

Worse was the fact that I had wasted six years in a futile attempt to attract someone who I thought I loved but who clearly had no reciprocal feelings for me which I have no doubt psychologists would have a field day with but at the time was the most important thing in my life.

I know I am not alone as I have met others who have done the same thing, butting their heads against a barrier like goldfish in a tank, constantly in denial and yet carrying on as if giving the woman in question yet another present would in some way bring her around. That is another story (part of the same another story alluded to earlier and which I may one day write).

For whatever reason, things simply did not work out but largely it was down to the fact that not going out much or being particularly social, especially with all my mates married off and long gone, I was not really in a position to meet anyone.

There was also the question of my appearance. I cannot tell you when or why it happened but one day I looked in the mirror and had the curious thought Well, I wouldn’t go out with you so why should I expect anyone else to do so? This is not some weird homosexual thing, before you ask, but there comes a point where you have to admit that if your target is beautiful, attractive and intelligent then you ought to at least attempt to offer the same in return.

Talk about stating the bleedin’ obvious. It was sad that it took me nearly fifteen years to realise what people had been telling me all along.

Now, I am not suggesting that fat people cannot be sexy or in any way nice people, just look around you and it will not take long to find many who are both happy in life and, more importantly, married to someone who loves them.

It was the former of these that was the problem. Fundamentally I was not happy in life and whether correct or not my weight was a large part of the problem, if you will excuse the pun.

Again I will not dwell on the details but in 2004 for whatever reason I found the strength to drop seven stone in weight. My friends and family were as stunned as I was at the result. The new Harry Forde was still overweight but it was the psychological impact that was most critical.

For the first time in nearly two decades, I was finally at peace with myself.

Okay, all very Zen but the fact was I was still just another face in the crowd, I had not changed my lifestyle all that much beyond dropping the odd few thousand calories every day from my dietary intake and my contentment was as much the final resignation that I would remain a bachelor than anything else.

It was during the spring of 2005 that an old college friend of mine announced her wedding. I had always counted her among the seriously attached crowd although her engagement had in fact lasted fifteen years and her kids were teenagers.

One thing after another had at first delayed their marriage until it had reached the point where not being married had become habitual. To this day I don’t know what triggered their decision to wed, whether it was out of a sheer whim or something more personal but whatever the reason the small white envelope popped through my letterbox sometime around Easter.

I will be perfectly honest my first inclination was to decline the invitation. By now I had spent my entire adult life going to parties, weddings and other social occasions alone. At first this had been no problem but as friends became couples I rapidly became the odd number. There is something frightfully British about the need for symmetry at a dinner party and as fewer and fewer single people remained it became more and more difficult to pair me up.

I did not notice when I stopped being invited to dinner parties due to my acute asymmetry but eventually it did occur to me.

Weddings were less of a problem; there were always odd numbers of distant relatives around which I could fill a gap even though it was worse to be on your own among weird strangers than to be single around people you knew.

Having never been a proficient gooseberry, I found myself more and more declining the few offers that came my way, gracefully doing the right thing (as I felt) and just keeping out of the way and not making a fuss.

So it would have been with Sandra’s wedding had I not bumped into her on the train and been embarrassed into saying I would go – well you can hardly say no to someone’s face especially when they are devastatingly attractive and you cannot think of a reasonable lie on the spot.

Committed as I was I sullenly put the date in my diary and returned the obligatory RSVP, grudgingly ticking the box to say that I would not be bringing a partner.

My only consolation was that the reception was to be held at the Malmaison Hotel in Oxford which is sited in the old Oxford prison – for those of you who remember the classic Ronnie Barker series Porridge it is the location used for Slade Prison prior to its conversion into a classy hotel.

I had wanted an excuse to go there for a long time so in some respects here was one handed to me on a plate. Had I not been so petulant I would have probably accepted on that basis alone though I know what you are thinking, I should have been going because she was a friend. I know and I can only apologise profusely for the way I was back then.

Sandra had not been on my course but had studied education. I only knew her as she had for a while gone out with one of my friends and we had oddly kept in touch where he had dropped off my radar years previously. Sandra had become used to using me as a sounding board and regarded me as safe, probably as she knew I knew she was well out of my league so would never dream of making a pass at her despite the effect she always had on my hormones.

More recently we had drifted apart as often happens with age but she had kept sufficient fondness for me and appreciation of the moral support I had given her to eventually invite me to her big day.

Luckily, I committed myself to going early enough to book a cell room at the hotel. If you have never encountered this place on the TV (I believe it was used in an episode of Inspector Morse), some of the rooms are in the cells in the old cell block and still maintain the thick metal doors, though the decor has vastly improved from its original purpose.

The big day arrived and fortunately the weather, forecast to be horrible, held during the service and the rain only arrived once we were safely ensconced in the hotel.

It is surprisingly cramped in the Malmaison and you appreciate, standing there with a glass of champagne and some indescribable canapé, what the conditions must have been like for the inmates. Despite the renovations, the wind still whistled under the doors and the whole place felt decidedly claustrophobic yet chilly at the same time.

I knew very few people. That is to say, I theoretically knew many of the guests but most of my friends I had not seen for many years and we had all changed markedly in that time. Conversation was stunted and dwelled for the most part on old times with the inevitable so what are you doing now ploy to compare yourself to your fellow students to measure your level of success.

For me it was quite a surprise to find that despite their success in the marriage department I was actually faring particularly well on the employment stakes and to my estimation ranked in the top five for salary. It gave me a small but satisfactory moment of smugness that was soon dissipated by the ever-present awareness of my single status.

The friend who Sandra had once dated was also there and I was pleased to discover that he had become a total arse. All guilt I harboured at having lost touch with him dissipated in an instant.

I stood, glass in hand, with the appropriate look of congratulations as the newly-weds made a few speeches, thanking us for coming and that sort of thing before explaining the arrangements for the rest of the evening.

With horror I listened as they described the inevitable disco. I dance about as well as a Manatee hang-glides so the moment the strains of Ebenezer Good piped up I was heading for anywhere but the dance floor.

The Malmaison is furnished with a number of outdoor places and in anticipation of the cold they had erected paraffin heaters. Despite this, few hardy souls ventured into the frigid night air and indeed the bulk of the party had seemingly embraced the booming noise, having all crammed into an area far too small to accommodate them all.

I found myself wandering through the nearly empty cell block with the words Norman Stanley Fletcher echoing in my mind as I decided what I was going to do given that it was evident the party had reached the drunken dancing stage.

The night was set to carry on in a similar vein and I had already availed myself of more than a generous helping of free wine, sampled the delights of the buffet and the excellent cheese table (and I mean table – there were exactly one hundred varieties on offer and while I gave it a good go I only managed about twenty) and was on the nicely content side of inebriation so made my way, glass in hand to the outside patio to contemplate whatever there was to contemplate out there but to generally sink into the small world of my own thoughts.

It took a while, therefore, to realise that I had company.

Running away from the disco? she asked.

My response was hopefully an intelligible acknowledgement. My horror of dancing was still with me and I was just glad to be away from the evil disco of embarrassment. I was also moderately drunk so the usual defensive mechanisms were malfunctioning.

Me too. She replied, confirming that my own response had been appropriate.

I’m Iona, by the way.

Robert.

The rest is all a bit of a blur and I have to say with some shame that we had been chatting for nearly an hour before I realised that I was on the pull. I am to this day not sure whether it was the alcohol, the disco or simply the fact that I had gone to the reception so sure of myself that I would meet nobody that when I in fact did the enormity of the situation completely went over my head.

By the time I did realise that I was successfully chatting Iona up and more importantly that she was willingly being chatted up it was far too late to get self-conscious or shy. The deed was well and truly done.

It was a very sobering thought that after over a decade and a half of trying too hard, the one time I wasn’t trying in the least was the one time I succeeded.

Iona was, indeed is, beautiful and that was not the wine talking. Before I knew it three hours had passed and the hotel employees were all strutting around in that isn’t it time you were all going to bed sort of way.

She was not staying, a family commitment required her to leave and drive back to her home county of Dorset. I had vaguely noticed that she was not drinking, partly I found out as she rarely ever did consume alcohol but mostly because of the fact she was driving. It also then occurred to me that despite this I had been happily topping up since we had met and was probably three sheets to the wind by now.

All I do recall was a rather awkward walk back to the car park to which I escorted her but which I suspect mostly involved her propping me up, an even more awkward kiss and then the horrible moment of realisation that I had no pen about my person so I gave her a business card with my phone number on which even today feels a bit cheesy.

Iona took it gracefully and drove off into the cold Oxfordshire night while I retired to my cell and passed out.

I was infinitely glad that the hotel had not preserved any of the original customs of the prison and that there was no early morning slop out. By the deadly silence in the cell block my fellow revellers were suffering as much as I and breakfast was a scantily-populated affair.

Having no plans for that day I enjoyed a very late morning in bed, setting my alarm to give me enough time to rouse, shower and pack before check-out time.

As I lay there the memory of the night before seeped into my mind along with the horror that the one time I had managed to hold a sensible conversation with a member of the opposite sex I had been so under the influence of alcohol that I had almost certainly made a complete tit of myself.

Gradually the conversation played back in my mind and I cringed as I listened to my loud, booze-fuelled voice which in the cold light of sobriety made me realise that I was probably not being anywhere near as charming as I had thought I was the night before.

Alcohol is known to break down certain inhibitions and this is very true in my case. Drunkenness affects different people in different ways – some are happy drunks, others are violent. For me it tends to eradicate my inherent shyness and I discover a gregariousness and confidence that I do not really possess. I would hate to see a video recording of myself drunk as I don’t think I would like what I saw.

It took me a long time to realise that I had completely slept through the text alert on my phone when Iona had contacted me. It seemed that perhaps I had been moderately charming after all.

My natural fear and shyness grew again but now it was different. I had already passed the first and most crucial hurdle and we had established that I liked her and she liked me. After three hours of chatting we had already compared at least the basics of our respective life stories and mutually reached the conclusion that we had seen enough to want to pursue it further.

Despite myself I was on the verge of having a real, serious girlfriend.

At this stage I will of course admit that as far as I was concerned it was all about me. Clearly, in my mind at least, I was the undesirable one, the problem one, the one that nobody sane would ever want to go out with. In my self-depreciating it had never occurred to me that there could be others out there, especially women, who felt the same way about themselves, who harboured the same self-doubt.

Iona was one of these. She had pretty much resigned herself to being single and had only attended the wedding as she worked with Sandra and had been pretty much embarrassed into going in a similar way as me.

It was quite amusing that we had met at an event that we both nearly didn’t go to.

You can probably see where this is going so I will spare you the gory details. Needless to say, I did call her and we met up the following weekend. That resulted in another weekend and then another.

Eventually, I had to ask her with some embarrassment whether we were actually going out or not, so naturally had we started doing so there was no real dating involved. One minute we were two single people, the next we were a couple. She laughed having thought exactly the same thing.

To this day, looking back, I still cannot believe that it happened or understand exactly how, not that I am in any way going to rock the boat.

A lot of it was down to our ages. I was now in my mid-thirties and Iona was twenty-nine. Both of us were past that stage of adolescent dating and both being relatively sensible people, we simply bypassed all that silly stuff and got on with the serious business of being a couple.

I felt like a million dollars and I know Iona was also happy but once the outside world had gotten over the nausea of our getting together it lapsed back to the fact that we were still both unremarkable people.

Being unremarkable did not bother me in the least neither, I am sure, did it concern Iona. We both had good jobs, were both in relatively good health and now that we had succeeded where neither of us had thought we would in terms of finding a soul-mate, the world was looking rosy.

All we knew was that years of loneliness and heartache had been washed away by the sheer fact that we had both met someone who understood how each other felt, who had lived the same agony.

For those of you out there for whom relationships have never been a problem you cannot understand the enormity of what this felt like. We were both at the brink of being single for the rest of our lives, both living the lie that we were single by choice even though everyone around us knew just how false that was.

I feel confident that I can speak for us both that in one stroke we had both achieved our life’s ambition...to be loved.

Chapter 2:

What do you mean, yes..?

It is scary how quickly you can become adapted to a situation. In my previous attempts at courtship as I have mentioned before, I took the spectacularly erroneous view that if I bought the lucky lady enough presents she would eventually look kindly on me. The truth, of course, was that I was just a persistently annoying sod.

With Iona things were very different. For one thing I didn’t actually buy her very much at first, mainly as there seemed to be no need. Things were ticking by just nicely and I was discovering what it meant to be truly in love with someone who loved you back, quite a revelation I can tell you.

Reciprocation of feelings had always been missing in all of my past attempts and while at first it was somewhat disconcerting I did have to remind myself that Iona was coming from the same background and was as eager to please as I was.

Looking back it was a wonder that for the pair of us those first few weeks were not more awkward than they were.

Still, I wasn’t complaining and before long we were a steady couple. I knew when things were really serious once we had been through the obligatory meet the family stage. I am not sure whose side came across as being weirder as we both have very colourful characters in our respective clans.

It did not matter. For my part I was meeting new people, getting into a whole new social circle – we were now a couple and therefore convenient for fitting around a table at dinner parties – and generally getting on with the whole relationship thing.

My priorities changed in an instant! Things that had been so vitally important to my mental wellbeing for so long were suddenly swept away as my new-found (and probably quite sickening to those who knew me) happiness took over.

The only thing that I still struggled with was my appetite – an addiction is, after all, just that.

Iona was the same. When it came down to it we really did not have an awful lot in common when it came to interest but on the other hand we were both open to new experiences and in that respect the first few months of our time together was a revelation to us both as we delved into each other’s lives.

You could argue that it was a case of opposites attracting, not that I would describe Iona and I as particularly opposite in many ways, we are just different and for me it was that wonderful amalgamation of two people to form a totally new union.

My previous failed relationship had been with someone from the office and while I had not learned much from that experience I had realised the dangers of mixing work and play.

Other couples of my acquaintance have met through work and pretty much all of them have undergone the same crisis – at what point does the conversation about the job cease? When that is the one thing you have in common and you are both living the same problems, it is incredibly difficult not to talk about it in your free time.

This is not to say that Iona and I did not discuss work but when you are comparing the joys of teaching with the intricacies of packaging design...well, they are worlds apart. Our work-related conversations were always subtly different, listening to the other, advising where possible but lending moral support as needed. We did not dwell on work as that was not what had brought us together. Our friends were not mutual ones from work and we were not living our relationship out at work.

In that respect I was infinitely glad that I had met her at an occasion about as removed from my job as possible as, I know, was she.

We were both filled with the excitement at being what was clearly going to be a long-term relationship and for the first time I found myself hazarding to dream a new dream.

For the best part of eighteen adult years it had all been about finding a girlfriend for me. Eighteen years of miserable failure, heartache and embarrassment. Thoughts of anything else were pushed into the darkest recesses of my mind as I struggled to take life one step at a time.

You couldn’t get married or, dare I say it, raise a family without a partner who was willing to partake in the great master plan and for me cracking this fundamental problem had been an insurmountable barrier.

Now, all of a sudden, that aspect of my life had unexpectedly solved itself, mostly as I had stopped fiddling with it and I now found myself daring to formulate new possibilities in my mind.

One thing you should understand about me is that aside from being fat, self-loathing and indulgently self-pitying, I am an old romantic at heart. I felt very strongly that it was my job to pop the question which therefore left me with both an exciting new possibility but also a terrifying new problem.

Things had gone very well, even down to the point that I had confessed to her after the psychological three-month barrier had passed that she was now my longest-serving girlfriend. Luckily, I think she appreciated just what that meant to me, especially as I suspect there was a trickle of a genuine tear leaking from my eye as I said it.

Looking back (which I do a lot and I am sure is not healthy), it was a funny moment but mentally a fundamental one. As we broke into our fourth month together I knew in my heart that it was for real.

The weeks rolled by and became months and yet I fundamentally failed to scare Iona away. The self-loathing demon sitting on my shoulder could not even begin to understand what it was she saw in me but I was not about to rock the boat. She was unlike anyone I had met before and my reactions towards her so different than the endless stream of desperate crushes my life had been strewn with.

I had no doubt as to my feelings yet despite all the evidence I could still not quite bring myself to accept that she was as serious as I.

One critical point came on my birthday. I had been dumped or at least bitterly wounded by women three times on my birthday to the point that it has become yet another of those critical emotional parts of my life.

Iona took me out for a fabulous dinner and we had a marvellous time, made even better for the fact that I woke up the next day still in a relationship with her.

Even my petty neuroses could not blind themselves to the fact that Iona was (in the words that I subsequently discovered she had told her mother about me) a keeper.

I have already mentioned that we were both in our thirties. I was languishing around mid-table while she had only just entered the decade. For the first time in my life I found myself contemplating the very real possibility that I might at some point consider the distant possibility of asking her at some stage in the foreseeable future potentially condescending to consider the option that we might, one day, actually get married.

Let’s be honest, despite my near terminal mindless false-optimism, tinged as it was with fanatic desperation, I had never actually thought that I would be in a position to be asking a woman to marry me.

The prospect was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. While it was in the process of exploring new uncharted waters, my mind found itself wandering into the even deeper depths of the biological clock.

I was not unaware of this and had seen one particularly disastrous relationship between two good friends of mine which had happened merely on the basis that she was acutely aware of the passing of years and, desperate as she was for a baby, had wound up with someone with whom she was entirely unsuited simply to produce a child.

Her desired outcome had happened but at the cost of their marriage and the whole situation had ended very badly.

Iona and I had danced around the subject of babies in that way that courting couples do. I have heard it said though I do not know the origin of the quote that relationships are like gloves – you try them on until you find one that fits.

What was evident from the very beginning was the fact that our conversation had two underlying themes. The first was simply to know the other person, to understand their history and their interests but the other, more subtle intent was to sound each other out on those particular subjects that would decide their suitability as a partner.

A desire to marry and attitude towards children were, of course, key in this near legal cross-examination. Now I am not saying that it is right or wrong to want to have children but as I have seen in those relationships I know about, disaster looms where the two partners are not aligned on their desires as my friend found to her cost.

I had never really thought about children. That dream fell below the list after marriage and that had been reliant on a relationship.

Now, however, it dawned on me that if I was going to consider marrying Iona I would also have to factor in the prospect of children and that required some deep soul-searching.

For the whole of my life I had regarded myself as a family man but that, I realised, was all too easy to say when there was absolutely no chance of it happening. Things were different now. The prospect of marriage was for the first time in my life seriously rearing its attractive head. I did not know if Iona had thought that far yet and, if she had, whether she was waiting for me to make the move but I knew that if I did there was a whole raft of other considerations that I had to be ready for and by far the most important of these was children.

Did I want a kid that was the question?

It would have been easy to blindly say yes, of course but it wasn’t as simple as that. Eighteen years of being a bachelor had left its mark. I was very used to my own company and living my life in a certain way and I needed to be sure in my heart that it was the right thing to do.

You can probably imagine that when I searched