NATASHA LUNN,
33
‘Mum’s fairy tale was both a blessing and a curse’
I grew up idealising my mum’s love life. Hers was a childhood sweetheart fairy tale: when she was 16, a boy who looked a bit like Rod Stewart sat down beside her in an art class and they fell in love. Forty-two years later, they are more in love than ever.
You might think that I would follow her example of a healthy, remarkable relationship and settle down young. I thought the same. And God, I tried my hardest to.
When I met my first boyfriend, aged 14, I thought: “This is it.” It didn’t matter that we mainly communicated through grunts (his) and cryptic emails (mine); I was following the template of my mum’s great love story. Except that while her teenage relationship resulted in a rare, beautiful everlasting love, mine ended with the boy cheating on me at school.
For the next 16 years, my love life looked nothing like my mum’s. After a two-and-a-half-year university relationship, I was single for most of my twenties, other than a string of disastrous flings that never passed the six-month mark.
My mum, Niki [right], couldn’t understand where she, or I, had gone wrong. Especially since all of her friends’ kids were marrying and having babies. One day she asked: “Did your dad and I ruin love for you?” She meant that perhaps they had given me unrealistic expectations.
Because having parents who are madly, deeply in love can be both a blessing and a curse. When you grow up around a remarkable relationship, it is difficult to settle for less, yet you know the odds of finding a love like that are not in your favour. Plus, the fact that my mum met my dad by chance, at school, made me feel like a failure when the same didn’t happen for me ( given I went to an all-girls school, perhaps this should not have been surprising). When I signed up to dating apps, aged 29, I felt embarrassed that I had to put effort into something that, for my mum, had happened so easily.
What I realise now is that while my mum’s relationship gave me an unrealistic example of a serendipitous meet-cute, it also gave me a precious understanding of what real love looks like in everyday life. We met our partners in different ways at different stages – I met my husband via a dating app at 30 – but our relationships are, I think, both extraordinary. Perhaps it is sheer bloody chance that I, like my mum, eventually found a remarkable love. Perhaps, without knowing it, she gave me the courage to wait for him.