The moment I knew: I was late for our date – but he waited for me in the cold winter night, under a halo of lights | Relationships

Tthe chances that Mike and I would ever meet were slim. We both grew up in Perth – the only problem was that he was in Perth, Scotland and I was in Perth, Western Australia. We then managed to find ourselves living in the same place (Melbourne) but in different parts of the city an hour’s drive away.

It was 2014, we’d both been divorced for about five years, and neither of us had much luck with internet dating. It didn’t help that my online profile was set to only show matches that lived within a 5km radius of my house. So even though I really wanted to find love, I obviously didn’t want to look any further than walking distance from my front door. The algorithm very wisely ignored me and compared me to Mike. I was intrigued by his profile; its title was: “Looking for a woman who can make me laugh.” In my experience, men usually want to be the funny one, to be the center of attention. I thought, this is me, I can do it.

Mike was late for our first meeting so I thought I was being stood up (turns out he just didn’t know how to find his way to Port Melbourne) but he ended up running into the pub with a big smile and tripping over some low furniture . He was instantly likeable, talking up a storm, very funny and witty, and at one stage squeezed my knee, not in a sloppy way, but just in a moment of pure exuberance. Turns out we both love the same dark comedy show, The League of Gentlemen, and could practically recite it scene for scene. I hadn’t even met anyone else who had seen it. When I got home that night, I told my teenage daughter and she said, “Mom, you should marry this man.” I thought, well, he’s funny, and I made him laugh, let’s see how this goes.

On our second date, it was my turn to be late. I had completely misjudged how long it took the tram to go down Collins Street on a Saturday night. It was a dark, bitterly cold June night with an icy wind and I was dressed to impress, not for the weather. A terribly timely man, as the tram moved at glacial speed, I gritted my teeth until they were ready to chip off like icebergs. There was little time to eat before the movie, and I was over half an hour late. Would he even wait?

It dawned on me that this was the first time I had been so eager to impress a man in a very long time. I had to rush down a slippery crowded alley in high heels to the restaurant. I assumed he would just sit inside in the warmth like any sane person would do, but there he was, standing in the dark waiting for me, wearing a silver suit with a halo of orange lights behind him. I wish I had photographed it; the whole scene looked like something out of a movie. At that moment I knew with absolute certainty that we would be together, that this was no longer just a date – this was the next stage of my life.

Three years later, in 2017, Mike surprised me with a romantic proposal at Glenfinnan in Scotland. True to us, even that had its funny side. There he was handing me an emerald ring on the shores of Loch Shiel while over his shoulder I could see a miserable wretch in a yellow waterproof jacket walking towards us just to let him know what was going on, panic look at his face and make a sharp turn at 90 degrees to pretend he was interested in the low shaggy bushes rather than the magnificent wide view of the water he had actually come to see.

When I think back on that second date, everything about Mike was there from the beginning – he was so funny, but also down to earth, solid, reliable and caring. The moment I saw him in the driveway, I knew this was a man who would leave the comfort of a warm room to go outside to wait for me in the dark and cold just so I knew where to find him.