I mentioned in last Saturday’s post that if you Google me, the first listing is a link to an article I wrote for the Sunday Express in 2009, which tells the story of how I met my future husband – when I was 50 and he was 29. To celebrate our second wedding anniversary, I’m going to tell you the story behind the story.
I was in the office at the Sunday Express, doing that girly thing of showing off my engagement ring to female colleagues. The editor came over to see what the fuss was about and when I told him I’d got engaged – at the ripe age of 51 – he immediately relaxed his furrowed brow, smiled broadly and said it had made his day.
Bear in mind this was in the thick of the credit crunch, just after the near-collapse of the banking system, and there wasn’t much good news to be had. He could see the story straight away: an independent woman who thought she’d never get married, finding love in middle age with a much younger man. Exactly the sort of thing to cheer up the readers on a dull Sunday morning.
So I wrote the story – one of the most personal I’d ever written – and it was published in January 2009 under the headline: “I found my true love at 50”. Even hardened news reporters approached me, slightly gooey-eyed, and told me it was the most touching story they’d read for ages. Younger women in the office told me I was “an inspiration”.
People like good news, and they don’t get enough of it. Anyway, on the morning that edition hit the newsstands, there was a knock on our door. It was a courier bearing a telegram from the production people behind ITV’s Good Morning, asking if we would like to appear on the sofa with Lorraine Kelly.
I called the number, whereupon a TV person asked me lots of questions about me, my fiancé, how I felt, how he felt, and what else we told the journalist who wrote the piece. When I told her I was that journalist, that I wrote the piece, she suddenly seemed less interested – as if being a journalist made me less of a “real” person.
Not surprisingly, I didn’t hear from her again. But even though we missed our moment on the daytime TV sofa, that wasn’t the end of the media interest. A few weeks later we were invited by Good Housekeeping magazine to appear in their feature about “unusual” couples.
I’m not sure why we said yes, but we did – probably because they wanted us to do a photo shoot and I thought it would be nice to have a new set of pictures. So we went to a house in north London that’s used for fancy magazine shoots and met the couple who were childhood sweethearts, lost touch and reunited later in life; plus the mixed-religion couple who had to battle prejudice to get married. “We’re the age-gap couple,” we said, and they all laughed.
We were styled to within an inch of our lives and posed in front of a fashionably distressed shabby-chic kitchen cupboard. I could barely keep a straight face all the way through, it was so surreal and absurd and so not us. However, it gave me a glimpse into how the media turns ordinary people into commodities.
After the Good Housekeeping feature appeared I had two more requests for interviews but we decided enough was enough. We didn’t want to keep retelling the story of how we’d met, or how we “dealt with” the age gap when it wasn’t an issue.
Apart from giving you an insight into how the media feeds on itself, what is it about our story that has such universal appeal? I suppose, as a never-before-married middle-aged woman, I represented a beacon of hope to all those women who don’t believe they’ll ever meet The One.
While I do believe that meeting my husband was a miracle and not a day passes when I’m not profoundly grateful for his presence in my life, I don’t want to become that story. Two years on, there are new stories we want to tell about ourselves.
Now I look at my wedding photos and remember the joy of the day but I’ve grown since then, I feel wiser as well as older. In the narrative arc of my life, meeting my husband was an exceedingly happy chapter, but the story moves on. In every moment there is a new tale to tell, and that fills me with hope.
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