A Very Accidental Love Story

by Claudia Carroll

  Then there was silence.

  Awkward, bum-clenching, tense silence.

  And then he suddenly threw his head back and guffawed laughing.

  ‘I know,’ he smiled. ‘I’ve known for ages. Since that day, in fact. Before I ever spoke to you, I’d asked poor old Harry’s family if they’d any idea who you were and they said no. Funny, I was wondering how long it would take for you to get around to telling me.’

  Now that was three years ago and amazingly, we’re still together. We got engaged last Christmas during a magical skiing holiday and are planning a September wedding later this year. It’s all worked out magically.

  But when people ask how we met, I just smile and change the subject.’

  Lizzie’s story: ‘You haven’t the first clue who I am, have you?’

  ‘Men? Don’t get me started,’ Lizzie all but snorts down the phone, as I gently start to coax her tale out of her.

  Because I had just about reached break point. Believe me, I’d had enough. I mean, come one, there are only so many bad dates one girl can go on, aren’t there?

  ‘Back in the day, I was a great one for internet dating; you know, all those sites like Match.com that faithfully promise you that five out of every ten couples that met via the site are now happily together, years later. And, like the moron that I am, I believed the hype.

  Well, this is the way forward for me, I figured. I was between jobs and broke at the time, so I though this would be a fantastic way to socialise and meet like-minded guys, all without having to leave the comfort of my own cosy sofa. Plus, at least this way, I can interact with men sitting in front of my computer screen in comfy fleece pyjamas, with no make-up on and three-day old manky hair. Perfect!

  But was I in for a right land, or what? Firstly, the lies people tell online, oh dear God, the outrageous, blatant whoppers. You couldn’t make some of it up, but here’s a rough guideline. For starters, if a guy describes himself in his profile as ‘cuddly’, it actually means ‘obese.’ Similarly, ‘enjoys a drink’, means ‘would basically suck the alcohol out of a deodorant bottle’. And, as I found out the hard way, ‘enjoys the company of women’, means, ‘ha! I’m actually going out with five other girls at the same time as you’.

  And don’t get me started on the sheer number of openly married men all trawling dating sites just looking for a bit of fun with no commitment or intention of every being anything other than married. No kidding, I even found one who told me that, and I quote, “I’m not free to meet at weekends, because my wife would find out.” But weekdays between nine and five, when the wife was off at work, were OK by him. He’d even used his wedding picture as his profile shot … with his new bride conveniently cut out of it.

  Needless to say, after a few months of this malarkey, I threw in the towel. Total waste of time and effort, I decided. So I started going out a bit more with friends, but none of us ever seemed to meet anyone interesting, date-wise. They were all either married, in long-term steady relationships or else gay. Demoralising, to say the least. I was well into my mid-thirties. Had I left it too late to find a significant other, and now had all the good ones been snapped up?

  And that’s when it happened. I was at the movies one night with a gang of friends, and we were all having a drink at the bar afterwards. It was mad busy, the usual packed Saturday night, and next thing I knew, some random guy bumped into me, as I was on the way up to the bar to get in another round.

  ‘Sorry,’ he apologised, then looked at me a bit more closely. ‘Oh, hi! It’s you!’

  I looked up hopefully, but no, it was no one I recognised. A tall, gangly looking guy, with long reddish hair all the way down to his bum, hippie-era-circa-Woodstock style. Who the hell was this?

  ‘You haven’t the first clue who I am, have you?’ he smiled down at me, and it was only then I began to see something vaguely familiar about him … but from where? My old job? No. The gym? Definitely not, sure I hadn’t shown my face in there in months.

  ‘Nice to see you with your clothes on for a change.’

  Course by then, I was in a complete flop-sweat. Please for the love to God, don’t let this be someone I had a fling with years ago, and I was too drunk at the time to even remember?

  ‘Emm,’ I gulped, ‘I’m really sorry about this, but where exactly did we meet?’

  ‘Give you a clue,’ he teased, blue eyes dancing. ‘I see you every weekend, at about the same time every morning, except more often than not you’re wearing pyjamas under a raincoat. Oh, and you sort of pretend to drink low-fat milk; at least, you take it down from the shelves and have a good stare at it, but then you always seem to replace it with a full-fat carton. You’ve a big thing about chocolate croissants, which in a weird way I kind of admire. I mean any woman who eats chocolate for breakfast must be OK, I figure. Oh and although you buy The Independent every week, you spend a helluva lot of time flicking through Hello! And OK! which by the way, you never actually buy.’

  He was having a great laugh at this, and then suddenly it came to me.

  Petrol station guy. From my local Texaco garage. The same one I saw behind the till there every single weekend, when I’d stagger in there bleary-eyed and looking like a complete mong-head in my PJs with a coat flung over them, no make-up and still stinking of whatever I was drinking the previous night.

  So I apologised profusely for not recognising him, but he gamely brushed it aside, then asked if he could buy me a drink. So we chatted and talked and it was amazing how much we had in common. A lifelong love of movies for starters. Turns out his name was Greg and he was putting himself through film school, so working at the garage helped pay his tuition fees.

  Anyway, the following weekend you can bet I went into that Texaco garage fully prepared to stock up on my Saturday papers; no pyjamas for starters, decently dressed from head to toe and looking, for once, semi-presentable. And as Greg and I got to chatting again, he casually mentioned he had tickets that night for a movie screening and asked me if I’d like to go.

  That was over a year ago, and neither of us have ever looked back. So I suppose the moral of my story is, don’t just look to the left and right … look everywhere. There are thousands of great, single guys out there, and they’re not necessarily trawling websites telling massive lies about themselves and doctoring their profile pictures. They’re in coffee shops and standing at bus stops and sitting beside you on trains.

  Just trust me. They’re out there.’

  Becky’s story: ‘Always the Bridesmaid …’

  ‘So Dave, my BGF (best gay friend) was finally getting married to his long-term partner and he’d asked me to be the bridesmaid, or ‘best woman’ as he insisted on calling me. Now at the time, civil partnership was a whole new thing, and I hadn’t the first clue what to expect from the day. Would it be all stiff and formal like a regular wedding? Because frankly, I wasn’t sure my stress ulcers could take it. You see, my younger sister had got married the previous summer and I’m not joking, my mum and Auntie Sheila still weren’t back on speaking terms after the blazing howler of a row they’d had over whether the bridal bouquet had exactly matched the toilet roll in the hotel bathroom. Or something of an equally similar magnitude, but then as we all know, the first casualty in any wedding is all sense of proportion.

  ‘I’m delighted to be best woman,’ I’d told Dave, proud groom-to-be, ‘but please promise me three things. No stress, no rows and above all, you’re not putting me in a stupid-looking pastel outfit that makes me look like a thirty-two-year-old trying to pass herself off as Bo-Peep. At my sister’s wedding, I’m not joking, you could have easily fitted three midgets under my dress.’

  Dave had just laughed away all my stressing and fretting. Relax, he told me. Because gay weddings were all about style over substance and totally OTT glitter balls on the dance floor and prancing down the aisle to Liza Minnelli. And therefore the total opposite of straight ones, he swore blind.

  But of course, the big downside; there’
d be next to no straight guys there for harmless flirtations with. I could get that right out of my head from the get-go. So, not such great news, if you happened to be a single gal hoping to get lucky on the night. (Although now that I think of it, that wasn’t strictly true; there were one or two only straight men there aside from each groom’s dad. Trouble was they all happened to be elderly uncles and pals of the parents, all without exception in the sixty-plus age category and all grandparents by now. But there you go. That’s a single girl’s lot, isn’t it?)

  And so, in the full knowledge that the whole day would be a manhunt-free zone, I gamely pitched up at Dave’s house on the morning of the wedding, bottle of champagne tucked under my arm, in a simple black dress that at least I felt comfy in. Who’ll be looking at me, anyway? I asked myself. Gay men spend their time eying up other gay men and refer to their women buddies as ‘beards’. Known fact.

  So of course, by the time I get to Dave’s house for the pre-wedding boozy brekkie, it’s like the party was already in full swing. His family were all buzzing round getting hair and make-up done while Dave posed for one photo after another, wearing a tiara and veil from the Pound Shop, in between him wolfing down mouthfuls of champagne and yelling at the top of his voice, ‘Look at meeeeee, everyone! I’m a BRIDE!’

  ‘You never told me you were getting a proper make-up artist,’ I’d laughed at him. ‘Oh yeah, that’s Brien, I found him through a friend of a friend. Though it would be fun for the girlies. Go on, get him to lash a decent bit of war paint on you! At gay weddings, the best woman is absolutely allowed to look more fabulous than either of the grooms!’

  So I sauntered over to this guy at the kitchen table, where he’d just about every Mac product known to man laid out neatly beside him, like a surgeon about to perform an operation. Turns out Brien was a complete dote too, tall and tanned with tight, gelled hair and a gym-toned body, but then as we all know, gay men go to the gym with the same level of devotion as religious people who do Mass every day. And he very kindly did a fantastic make-up job on me, really and truly transforming my usual pasty-face into someone glowing that I barely recognised in the mirror. I’d had professional make-up jobs done before, but somehow my face always ended up looking like a half-dissolved Rubex tablet, with the ridiculous amounts of bronzer and blusher they’d lash on. But this was really amazing work; Brien had somehow made me look like the best possible version of myself, the one that managed to get eight hours sleep a night and occasionally remembered to use night cream.

  And all the time, he and I were giggling and messing and all I could do was look at him and think, why oh why are all the good ones gay? I always found any of Dave’s buddies miles easier to chat to than any of the straight guys I knew; for starters, you were completely relaxed and at ease with them. You knew from the off that sexual chemistry was right out the window, so you could just totally be yourself around them.

  So Brien joined us all for the big day and I have to say, it was by the mile the best wedding I’d ever been to in my life, bar none. Kind of like a straight wedding, but with all the boring, crappy bits cut out. For starters, both grooms came down the aisle together to Nat King Cole’s ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’ … none of your boring old wedding march here! Then another pal of Dave’s got up to do a reading. Solemn-voiced and sombre, he began, ‘A reading from the book of Beyoncé.’ There were weird looks all around but then of course, two seconds later, we’re all clapping and laughing and singing along too; amazing. The whole ceremony bit was all over in around ten minutes – which, by the way, is the perfect length for any wedding service – and before we knew it, Dave was married to the love of his life and dancing back down the aisle again to, what else? Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’, of course. You had to ask?

  Anyway, at the knees-up afterwards, lovely Brien kept on asking me to dance time and again. We had an absolute ball and really got on like a house on fire so when he asked for my phone number at the end of the party, I was delighted.

  My flatmate that bit less so, when I told her. ‘You already have so many gay men friends in your life,’ she warned me, ‘do you really need another one? They’re only filling up your time and preventing you from meeting someone straight. Someone that you might actually have a shot at a relationship with.’

  Now OK, admittedly the girl did have a point. I seemed to spend far more time around gay men than straight ones, and I certainly spent way more time talking about their relationships than I ever did talking about my own. Or rather my own lack of them. In fact there was next to nothing I couldn’t have told you about gay-land.

  Somehow though, I couldn’t bring myself to take my flatmate’s advice; Brien was just way much fun to be around. Plus every time we went out, he gave me the most fabulous goodie bag samples from Mac and Clinique, not to mention stunning nail polishes from Chanel … Come on, what girl in her right mind wouldn’t love having a new pal who came bearing freebie make-up samples? He and I became really close in a short space of time and pretty soon, we were inseparable. Then one night, after a plate of pasta at his flat when he’d asked me round to watch Strictly Come Dancing and slag off the judges, he tried to kiss me.

  Well I nearly leapt off the sofa with the sheer shock of it. ‘Brien?’ I spluttered at him, ‘may I remind you that you’re a gay man!’

  ‘What?’ he looked at me, stunned.

  ‘Well … I mean, you are, aren’t you?’

  And it turned out, like so much else in my life, that I’d got it completely arseways. He was straight! Really genuinely straight! Proper boyfriend material! Course he was well used to people thinking he wasn’t, the whole make-up artist thing for starters, and as I told him afterwards, the sheer amount of time he spent in the gym alone would make any women seriously think twice about his orientation. But once I’d got over the shock of it, I started thinking … you know, this is really lovely. The two of us got on brilliantly and chances are, if I’d suspected he was straight right from the get-go, I’d have been all tongue-tied and on edge with him, almost with an invisible sign over my head saying, ‘like me! Please like me, I want a boyfriend!’

  Because of course, that was my whole trouble, wasn’t it? The very minute I knew a guy was available, I started acting like a compete desperado in front of him. Wow, what a turn-on. Was it any wonder I was well into my thirties and alone?

  All that was about two years ago and I’m delighted to tell you that Brien and I are now happily and very compatibly living together. Funny though; to this day, when I tell people what he does for a living, I can practically see them doing a double take and wondering, does this one realise her boyfriend is gay? Just look at the biceps on him for starters!

  Just as prejudiced as I was. But whenever it does happen, I’ll just laugh it off and say yes, I know what you’re thinking, because that’s what I first thought too. But guess what? I was well wrong and so are you.’

  I suppose the moral of my tale is this; don’t judge anything by its cover … you might just be very surprised.’

  So there you have it, girlfriends everywhere.

  You might well think that Valentine’s Day is complete rubbish and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with you there. ‘A Hallmark holiday,’ my mother dismissively sniffs, claiming that back in her day, it just didn’t exist. Then of course, some bright spark sitting in a skyscraper on Madison Avenue, who I’d say scores of women would now want to disembowel if they ever met him, decreed that the gap between Christmas and Easter was just too long, and card companies needed something in between to keep their quarterly revenues looking rosy. And now here the rest of us all are, stuck with it, whether we like it or not.

  Single people despise it, and with good reason; I mean, come on, who actually enjoys going to the newsagents only to have to battle your way through gakky heart shaped helium balloons and piles stacked high of garish pink and red overpriced chocolates? And you wonder; are these just ‘grab something at the last minute to keep herself happy’, type impulse
buys for fellas, who know they’ll be murdered for daring to come home on the big day empty-handed?

  Nor is it a barrel of laughs for couples either. The pressure of trying to be romantic, just because the card companies and newsagents decree it. And you just try getting a last-minute restaurant reservation on the big night, so you can pay hyper-inflated prices just to sit there looking at other stressed-out-looking couples all doing exactly the same thing.

  But all I’m saying, is let’s try to get beyond this and see the bigger picture. Believe me I know from long and bitter experience all about being alone.

  But I also know that romance is out there, and for all of us. After all, if I can meet someone, I know anyone can.

  So if you’re reading this and you’re single, please let me leave you with this one final message.

  Do not, I repeat, do NOT despair. Because trust me, he is out there. Somewhere.

  And he’s just waiting for you …

  Happy Valentine’s Day, keep the faith and much love,

  From,

  Eloise Elliot

  xxxxxxx

  About the Author

  Claudia Carroll was born in Dublin, where she still lives and works as a full-time writer.

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  Jessie Woods absolutely believes in fairytale endings. So would you if you had a high flying career as a daredevil TV host, a palatial pink mansion, and the dream boyfriend.