‘WE’VE FOUND A WAY TO HAVE FREEDOM AND A FAMILY LIFE’

Mia Livingston, 48, mental health consultant, and Rob Livingston, 47, fintech executive, west London

I’m a mental health consultant and a child-free-by-choice Buddhist bohemian, and before we fell in love, I always swore that I would absolutely never date anyone who had children, was Christian or remotely suburban. A former banker, Rob ticks the entire list of my “nevers”, and for his part, he’d always wanted a nice safe Christian life with a stay-at-home mum to his kids. My whole life and values were the opposite of that.

And yet, as classmates in a Jakarta high school 30 years ago – we were third culture kids – in spite of finding ourselves on opposite sides in a couple of passionate arguments about life values, for some reason we’d always admired each other more than anyone else. When we randomly touched base again on Facebook in our 40s as friends, after a while he admitted he’d had a crush on me at school, and within a few weeks, the conversation snowballed completely out of control, and it felt like our worlds exploded. Against my will, choice and better judgment, I was angry to find myself helplessly in love with him. We’ve now been happily married for six years and have set up home in the UK.

Marrying into an existing family is complicated but I jumped in feet-first and am now stepmum to all four of Rob’s children, with the youngest living with us – and it feels very natural. If you have unconditional love, it works itself out. I never really wanted kids, but I figured I’d have two eventually. But by my 40s I didn’t want babies: I wanted us to have the freedom to enjoy ourselves. Amazingly we’ve found a way to do both – have freedom and a family life.

I always prioritised travel and adventure, whereas he thought creating stability was more important. Now we’re together we can have both.

Until I got together with Rob, nobody has ever added to my life and made me want to put them first. Personalities, vocations and lifestyles are only surface differences. We do have rules about arguing respectfully and remembering that we’re both coming from the same place. There’s always a common ground when you love someone, and I’m always digging for that common ground.

We may be polar opposites on the surface, but we have the exact same values when it comes to what’s really important, in particular trying to leave the world a little better than we found it. We’ve both learned from mistakes in the past that things can go horribly wrong when you try too hard to engineer reality to become what you think it should be.

Rob says At school I thought she was absolutely gorgeous and super-smart but problematic. I was 14 and she was 15, so I couldn’t ask her out! And now we’re a couple, while we’re two very different people, I support her in everything she does. We’ve chosen to adopt each other’s religious values to an extent. It would be shortsighted not to see the world through her eyes. I don’t want her to change and I’m happy when she’s happy.