I told my friend about him. ‘He sounds wrong,’ she said. ‘But he looks like Paul Newman,’ I retorted. ‘He’d want to,’ she said

EVERY LOVE STORY is a great love story in the beginning, and then comes the middle, and then the end.

I was 25 when I met the man I married. We were both at the same East Coast university in America as international students: I had gone there from Cork to study for a PhD in American history, he was a philosophy student from England. We met on our first day at the university. We had both left the international student meeting we were supposed to be at to stand outside in the blue dusk and smoke a cigarette.

Looking back now, I see that there was something fundamentally similar in the two of us that made us leave the universities we were at, the countries we lived in and all we knew, and move to a completely different environment, simply because we wanted to. And then, to leave the student meeting that we both found dull; to stand in the old cobbled courtyard and smoke, and to see each other and recognise something in each other and to start talking and smoking together – we were of a kind, in some essential way.

In the beginning, though, it didn’t feel like that. A week after we met, we went to a campus party together, and I overheard someone ask him how old he was and he said 20. I was so shocked that I had to leave the room. I had presumed he was the same age as me: when you’re 25, a 20-year-old is almost of a different generation. Plus, he was English, and I am ardently Irish. And he was Jewish, I learned, as we approached Christmas and he said, ‘Christmas, I don’t celebrate it so much’. His family had come from Russia at the turn of the century, and had settled in England and America. He was the first Jewish person I had ever met. And he was athletic. County runner! Long distance swimmer! And into music and bands I had never heard of. And cool in a way I would never be.

I went home to Cork for Christmas and told my friend about this guy I had met in America. ‘Well,’ she said, after I’d finished describing him, ‘he sounds all wrong.’ ‘He looks like Paul Newman,’ I’d retorted, stung, and she’d laughed then and said, ‘He’d want to.’

I learned, quickly, that to other people the differences between us were evidence of something being wrong, off. But to me, ultimately, the differences were nothing. It was the similarities I was interested in. I’d had boyfriends who were like me in the obvious ways (the same age, the same religion, from the same place) and in the less obvious ways (bookish, methodical, excellent at timekeeping) and I’d felt flat, dull in their company. My soul was not satisfied when I was with them. Now, at last, I felt free.

We were together for ten years before we married. The thing that had brought us together that first night, the restlessness in us both, made us want to move, to travel. We saw as much of the world as we could, like people in a hurry: Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, Cuba, Bali.

After university in America we lived in Scotland, then in Australia, then London. In London, we found a flat, and friends, and work we liked. We were getting older, now – especially me, I began to think, I seemed to be getting older faster than him. So we started to talk about marrying.

He proposed in the desert, at night, in Israel. We had a small civil wedding in west Cork, in the early spring, because we couldn’t be married in a church. We wrote our own vows, pleasing only ourselves in the process. That summer, we had a much bigger wedding party in the South of France. Because we couldn’t be married in a synagogue, we found a very, very liberal ex-rabbi online and flew him to France and had an unscripted ceremony before our confused friends and families and then a lively party with Irish musicians and a klezmer band. It was a memorable day, people said afterwards, half-bemused, half-delighted.

We’ve been together now for 20 years, half our lives. We have three children. In December we celebrate Chrismukkah: Hannukah and Christmas, combined. We have Easter and Passover. The children support the Irish rugby team and the English football team. They have family in Ireland, Israel, America, England.

The differences in background, in culture, that were there between us at the start have faded away, and we’ve fostered traditions of our own. We are our own small, new world. We are our own story now, a story that we tell each other, tell the children.

In the beginning of the story there was just us. In the middle there was us, and the children. Towards the end, I think, it will just be us again, and we will travel the world again, and once again be free.

And through it all, there was love, and luck.