Yahoo News Grace Dent tells all about getting with her partner after two years of Instagram comments
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MasterChef critic and restaurant writer Grace Dent has opened up about her relationship — describing the 'inescapable' feeling when you've found 'the one'.
Dent spoke to Kate Thornton on White Wine Question Time about her work, her friendship with Tom Parker Bowles and grieving after the death of her mother this year.
She also opened up for the first time about how she got into her current relationship which started as two years of commenting on each other's Instagram posts.
She said: "With my man, Charles, I think almost every day whenever I look at him: 'How did I pull this off?' Because before we got together, I used to follow him on Instagram, and he followed me and there was at least 24 months where I used to just look at his photo and go: 'He's so pretty.'
"It was very gradual because we followed each other because we knew people in common. It's a very modern but very actually mundane way of people getting together. One of you leaves a comment and then the other one leaves a comment back but it was after about a year and a half, two years of leaving comments [that we met up].
"I was in Liverpool working, and I was feeling really, really miserable. I'd been interviewing Brett from Suede and I'd had a lovely time, but I was just feeling a bit down. You wake up in a hotel room by yourself and you just feel: 'What's the bloody point'?
WATCH: Grace Dent on MasterChef, gravy-drinking, and keeping in shape
"And then I just got I got this little message from him saying that he would like to take me for a coffee. I thought: 'Oh, my God. I'm going to meet you and you're going to be a dickhead!'"
She said she knew lots of people and had had experience herself of never finding the right person, continually dating but there always being something in the way or an excuse.
Buy it: Hungry by Grace Dent | £7.99 from Amazon
She continued: "The fact is people just bloody turn up. They just do. You go around and you do the dating and you chase people, you chase them and chase them.
And they're like: 'Oh, I'll be available when this happens', but they're not. Or you play games. And then everybody gets to a point where you just go out for a drink one night, and you end up sitting with somebody, and then that's it. And there's no games and there's no 'I'm not sure what I want'.
"It just happens. It's inescapable. Most people, when you find out how they met the love of their life, it's just they kind of got off with each other one night, and then they just never went home!"
She described to Thornton the first time she met her partner in person. She said: "He was absolutely gorgeous. I saw him across the bar. And one thing is turning up when somebody is completely not the person that they said, God that happens.
"But then what's almost worse — no, it's not worse, but it's similar — is when you turn up and the person is the person. And you're like: 'Oh, s***, here we go. Here we go. Here is my heart, to be dragged and thrown at a wall from 25 feet! Kill me now!'"
She also remembered how her mum, who died in February this year, used to talk about relationships: "My mother used to always say to me: 'Every pot has a lid.'
"And I used to think: 'Oh, shut up mam.' But she used to say worse things. If two really awful people got together she'd go: 'Well, at least they're not spoiling two houses! I still say that now, when you got a really horrible kind of media couple — 'At least they're not spoiling two houses!'"
WATCH: How Grace Dent and Tom Parker Bowles smashed their food festival award, literally!
