HOW I ACCIDENTALLY FOUND THE ONE

By a writer whose romantic ideals had her chasing Mr Wrong for years, when Mr Right was right under her nose

Like Tess, the heroine of my novel Miss You, I’ve always been sceptical about the idea of The One. In a world of billions of people, it’s just not possible, is it, that there’s only one person who’s right for you? What if that person spoke a different language? What if he or she lived thousands of miles away? Isn’t who we fall in love with actually determined by geography more than fate? All the iconic couples from literature lived quite near each other. Romeo and Juliet in the same city, Cathy and Heathcliff the same house... but, of course,

that’s not exactly what we mean by The One. The One is our way of talking about a feeling; a passion so strong and special that you believe it must be unique.

As a child of parents who no longer seemed to like each other much, I only had romantic role models from literature, and I read voraciously; graduating quickly from children’s staples to my parents’ bookshelves lined with classics by the Brontës, Thomas Hardy and D H Lawrence, which my mother liked, as well as dusty paperbacks from the 1960s by Alan Sillitoe and John Braine, which my left-wing father enjoyed. These, together with Jackie magazine, which I smuggled into the house and read by torchlight, formed the basis of my romantic education.

It’s Jackie that I blame for my expecting teenage boyfriends to be tall, dark and handsome and have one-syllable names like Jed or Rick. Occasionally, I would introduce them to my lovely gran, with whom I was very close.

‘Mick’s really good-looking, isn’t he?’ I’d whisper as we made tea in her tiny kitchen.

‘You don’t want to worry too much about looks,’ she used to tell me, her eyes glazing with tears. ‘What you want to find yourself is a kind man.’

Her own husband had been jealous and violent. When he discovered she had been going to ballroom-dancing classes with a friend on her afternoon off, he’d threatened to kill her. Somehow my gran had managed to maintain her sunny and positive personality throughout the marriage and, in the year following his death, well into her 60s and suffering from arthritis, she’d received three separate proposals of marriage, from men she’d got chatting to in her front garden.

‘Oh no,’ she told me, when I asked why she hadn’t thought about accepting any of them. ‘I’m not going to wash anyone else’s socks.’

If real-life marriage meant bickering, resentment, threats and sock washing, it was never going to be for me, and the idea of someone whose distinguishing characteristic was kindness was obviously a complete turn- off. I left home for university, determined to find a deep and swoony soulmate with whom I could pursue a life of unfettered passion, free from the drudgeries that marriage appeared to promise.

Given the choice – and there was a choice because at that time, at Oxford University, there were apparently eight male students for every female one – I was always drawn towards exotic and slightly windswept, taciturn but cruelly witty, or, best of all, troubled and poetic types. I still have a vague memory of a party in a freezing cricket pavilion on the outskirts of town, where a perfectly nice guy was trying to chat me up. At that moment, I spotted a Byronically handsome postgraduate I’d had my eye on, who swept me off to his room and read me Yevtushenko.

In my friendships with both men and women, I was generally perceived as a bold, opinionated person, but when I was in a relationship that strength seemed to disappear. It was this loss of self that felt to me like true love. Weren’t all the great affairs – from Mr Rochester to Oliver Mellors – ultimately about troubled men rescued by the selfless love of a good woman? Somehow, I identified feeling tortured and miserable as evidence of passion’s presence.

I spent most of my 20s in a sporadic relationship with a fiendishly clever, witty, difficult person, whose background was straight out of an angry-young-man novel. Whenever we were together, we existed in a kind of bubble because his primary emotion was despair and he never wanted to meet any of my friends. They all thought I was crazy; I thought they didn’t understand his fascinating complexity. I was, of course, sure he was The One because I felt constantly sick with anxiety. I still occasionally went to parties – without him, obviously. Sometimes I’d bump into a guy who’d been at school with a good friend of mine and who now lived abroad mostly, teaching English as a foreign language. He returned to the UK regularly, and somehow we’d always end up in some banal argument.

On one occasion, in my early 30s, I was giving a party myself and asked my friend who she was going to invite. She mentioned his name. My response was, ‘Oh no, not that prat who lives in Egypt!’ ‘He’s just passing through on his way to Spain,’ she said.

I was having that party because I was trying to cheer myself up after a really difficult year following my father’s death. When I opened the door to my friend and the prat, the latter made

some joke about the patent leather boots I was wearing. I smiled through gritted teeth.

Later, I found myself inadvertently sitting next to him. He asked how life was treating me. It was too late in the evening to feign a bright and breezy party face and, for some reason, I started talking about grief. He listened. He was sympathetic. And also, I thought, as the evening wore on, he was really very funny and attractive. He didn’t leave my flat that night. In fact, he never left. Reader, I married him. Our relationship felt so easy and different from anything else either of us had experienced that we wanted to make that commitment to each other.

We decided almost immediately to go to Spain together, and married in the same year. Now my friends were really worried. I was giving up a career to live abroad with a man I’d known for just a few weeks. Except I hadn’t, because when we looked back, we both vaguely remembered meeting at that cricket pavilion party when we were first-year students. Over the years, we must have bumped into each other half a dozen times. He’d seen me at my flirty party best and at my argumentative worst, and he’d seen me cast down by sorrow. And he still liked me. For the first time in a relationship, I felt I could be myself, except it was a different kind of self. Because I was happy.

So we went to Spain and it rained for five months of the year, and the place where he worked was awful, and I had to have an emergency operation, and we had very little money, but we actually came home more in love than when we left.

The following year, we had our son, who suffered from serious medical difficulties as a child. For many years, the main focus of our lives became making sure his life was as normal and enjoyable as possible, which involved my husband changing his job and me helping at my son’s schools and doing freelance writing work at home. When our son grew up to be a self-sufficient teenager, there was a point where my husband and I looked at each other and I think we both thought, ‘Well, what’s the purpose of us now?’

In one way, it was a happy thought. After all, we’d been working towards nurturing a confident and independent young man. In another, it felt rather depressing. Our son would soon leave for university, and how would our lives be then? I think we’d lost sight of our relationship because we’d been concentrating so much on our son’s needs. As we waved our boy off on his first holiday without us, my husband turned to me and said, ‘What shall we do?’

So we did what any middle-aged couple would do in the circumstances, and went Interrailing. You can Interrail first class now. It’s still relatively inexpensive, but more luxurious, and no rucksacks have to be involved. There’s also the thrill of exploring a city you don’t know, and the pleasure of trundling through new landscapes, staring out at vines and mountains, or reading great big novels that you never have time for at home.

We discovered that we still loved foreign travel, and, more importantly, each other. It was as if by going back to the beginning, we remembered what made us right for each other. So that’s when we came up with the plan that when our son left for university, we wouldn’t mope around an empty nest but instead try living abroad again. In preparation, I learned to teach English as a foreign language, a job that gave me everything I had missed while working at home – a new skill, the opportunity to meet people and, best of all, a gossipy staff room. And around the same time, I had an idea for a novel about two people who keep missing the opportunity to meet properly.

When people now talk about my characters Tess and Gus being ‘meant for each other’ I hesitate, because I wonder if they would have been if they had got together when their paths first crossed at the age of 18. I think that finding The One is as much about timing as any coup de foudre. What I do know is that it isn’t a good idea to have a fixed notion of The One, because you might easily miss the chance of meeting someone who actually makes you happy. My lovely gran was right: ‘What you want to find yourself is a kind man.’ I only wish she’d lived long enough to meet my husband.

Oh, and by the way, we have a washing machine for the socks and have recently started going to ballroom-dancing classes… Miss You by Kate Eberlen is published by Mantle, price £12.99. To order a copy for £9.74 (a 25 per cent discount) until 4 September, visit you-bookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640; p&p is free on orders over £15

With a fixed idea of The One, you might miss out on someone who makes you happy

Kate with her husband Nick