‘It’s that warm feeling after being together for decades’
Radio Ulster’s Kerry McLean is married to fellow presenter Ralph, with whom she has three children, Tara (12), Dan (10) and three-year-old Eve. She says:
I’ve always been a sucker for a good romantic film. There’s a strange joy that comes from having your heart wrung out as you watch the romantic leads go through the trials and tribulations that love brings, before hopefully leading to a happy ending.
At 13 or 14 years old, my best friend, Sharon, and I would spend entire days during the summer holidays watching movies like Dirty Dancing, Top Gun and An Officer and a Gentleman, which left us with very high expectations of what love should look like.
The wee lads who grew up around us hadn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of matching up to the charms of Patrick Swayze.
Instead of scooping us up and whisking us on to the dancefloor of the local under-18s disco with the proclamation, ‘Nobody puts baby in a corner’, we had teenagers, liberally coated in their dad’s Brut aftershave, lumbering up to ask, ‘My mate fancies you, are you up for a court?’ Not quite the romantic proposal the films had taught us to expect.
Of course, as you grow up, you learn that love isn’t something that can fit neatly into a heart-shaped box — it’s not one-size-fits-all — and it can grow and develop, or become flattened and fade away.
I was very lucky to have my parents’ marriage as a template for my relationship.
They were together for almost 45 years and worked hard at maintaining the romance between them.
They made time for each other, bought or made little gifts, wrote notes and said ‘I love you’ all the time.
That’s not to say they didn’t argue. I remember one caravan holiday when my daddy went into self-imposed exile in the car for every mealtime after he and my mum had words.
He’d had a dental plate fitted to replace teeth knocked out when he was playing rugby, but it had come loose and kept falling out of his mouth and into his food when he was eating.
Mum said it was disgusting, but my dad took it to heart and refused to eat in front of her for the rest of the trip.
By the time we were travelling back home, the two of them were in hysterics, giggling about it, back to holding hands and being best friends.
And I think, for me, that’s what love is.
When someone can say or do something that makes you roll your eyes and sigh, when they can spend what seems like hours talking you through the offside rules in football or have completely alternative views to your own when it comes to issues as disparate as backgammon and Brexit, yet you still want to finish the day holding hands and laughing.
Love is an intense need to have the other person in your life, a big warm feeling in your chest when you see them, even after decades of being together, and the knowledge that you’ll always have each other’s back.
Love is not ‘never having to say you’re sorry’, as Ali McGraw told Ryan O’Neal in another of my favourite romantic movies Love Story.
Ali’s character may have been speaking from the heart, but her words might as well have been coming out of another bit of her anatomy altogether…”