Bitter-sweet

December 6th: good Christmas/bad Christmas

For this prompt I focussed on Christmas 1987, when I felt the bitter sweet pangs of unrequited love for the first time. It was simultaneously the best and the worst  feeling in the world and made for a bit of a car crash of a festive season. Much weeping into cider and black at friends' parents' houses. Oh! the drama!

That's him, my first love. I met him in my first term at university in 1987. I was a tender young drama student, he was worldly 3rd year, studying international politics. I was smitten straight away and so was he - with my best friend (thankfully, she wasn't interested). I spent that first term determined to win his affection in the only way I knew how: by subjecting him to relentless, withering sarcasm.  Oddly enough that didn't work and by Christmas 1987, although I'd wormed my way into his social group, I was no closer to being his inamorata. I was just a mate. A rather snarky, overly critical one.

My friend took this photo of him and I nicked it off her and took it home with me over the Christmas holidays, tacking it above my bed and gazing despondently at it. I got so far as checking the phone directories to see if I could find his parents' phone number and address (although we went to uni on the other side of the country, he only lived about 10 miles from me and had a distinctive surname). I think I found it too, but thankfully a friend pointed out that suddenly appearing outside his house could be interpreted as being just to the bunny-boiling side of erotomania, and I never did go. Probably for the best. I still think he was lovely, but  on reflection he probably had a lucky escape.

Except no he didn't, he's in the kitchen right now, washing up and shouting at the cat. Yes, Reader, I married him! I went back to uni in the January, not really fancying my chances too much, but out of the blue I maneuvered him into asking me out the following month! We've been together ever since - 22 years next Feb (although he says it feels a lot, lot longer...).