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Shellsuits and a sofa emergency: why meeting my wife is my favourite ‘first’

Shellsuits and a sofa emergency: why meeting my wife is my favourite ‘first’. In the final essay in a series on memorable firsts, Alexi Killduggins reminisces about finding true love … while wearing fancy dress

There are many memorable “firsts” in my life. The first time I freewheeled a bike down a hill, and understood what the exhilaration of flying must feel like. The first time I found myself gibbering: “Ohmygodohmygod” after putting a blue cheese toastie into my mouth. Or when I tried breaking into my own house after forgetting my keys and my mum called the police on me.

Hey, they all make for good stories.

But my favourite first? The one that will make me cherish the sheer beauty of life until my dying day? Which, at the time made my head spin like the universe had just spent 50p on a fairground carousel? And which did so while feeling like an extremely bizarre romcom? The first time that I met the woman who would be my wife.

The year is 2012, the location: my living room. Luscious mullets flutter in the breeze, dramatic smoke envelops shellsuit-clad forms and the air is thick with Chesney Hawkes. It’s a party atmosphere: people dance, others sing, wine flows like wine. And I stand in the midst of it, awestruck. Because as bouffant lycra wearers mill around me, I am locking eyes with Adam Ant. And Adam Ant is the most beautiful woman I have ever met.

See what I mean? That, right there, is the opening scene to a romantic comedy straight out of the minds of the creators of Stranger Things. When me and my future wife met, we did so at a 1980s house party I was throwing – she was in fancy dress as a dandy highwayman, I was clad from head to toe in a highly synthetic (and highly flammable) tracksuit. I’d been hoping to look like Public Enemy’s Flavour Flav. But in reality, I looked more like a member of ex-noughties Welsh rappers Goldie Lookin’ Chain. Or one of Harry Enfield’s scousers. When I met the love of my life, I was a walking fire hazard in sweatbands.

At this point, my confidence with women was not high. The preceding years hadn’t been a good time for my love life. In fact, only an extreme optimist would even use the term “love life” of the disastrous string of blind dates, month-long relationships and fruitless subscriptions to dating sites with which I frittered away most of the decade. I had pretty much given up even talking to people I found attractive by this stage. If I’d seen someone this beautiful in a bar, I wouldn’t have even bothered. But this: this was different. It was my living room. Everyone knows that you can’t be crushingly rejected in the same room as your lovely, comfy sofa. So, in what was an extremely rare act for me, I wandered over and said the most spellbindingly bewitching and romantic words ever to emerge from the mouth of this silver-tongued Casanova.

“Hi. Nice costume.”

You see why I was single.

Fortunately, she was flattered by the compliment – coming as it did, from someone whose dedication to fancy dress made them look like they’d just tried out for Accrington Stanley’s 1980s Milk Cup squad. And, to my utter giddy joy, we hit it off instantly. We spent most of the night together: talking, dancing, sampling 1980s drinks such as Babycham and wishing we hadn’t sampled 1980s drinks such as Babycham. As the evening drew to an end, we found ourselves snuggled up on a sofa, sharing a moment during which it was pretty clear that a romance was blossoming. I looked down at her, she looked up at me and our eyes locked in a long, lingering moment that could only end in our first kiss.

Until one of my flatmates burst in and shouted: “Quick! You’ve got to go into the lounge!” Apparently, there was an urgent “situation” that needed taking care of. A really, really bad one. Something that was about to destroy our entire party. A situation that he described as: “A sex vibe”.

Not only did this sound like utter nonsense: it was (I blame the Babycham). But after leaving the room to discover a total lack of “sex vibe”, I ended up finding something way worse. On my return to my spot on the sofa, the beautiful highwayman had disappeared. I would later find out that the “sex vibe” nonsense was so strange she assumed it was a bizarre attempt to rescue me from an unwanted romantic entanglement. She’d thought she was being given the cold shoulder and had left. And when I saw that she wasn’t there any more? I thought it was me who was being spurned. That night, I slept alone in a shellsuit.

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And then, exactly one year later, we bumped into each other in a bar. Now with no flatmate to separate us, we quickly cleared up what had happened. Our strange initial meeting became a shared joke, and though neither of us said it, I think the fact that we’d assumed we’d never speak again somehow made this chance encounter feel weirdly romantic. By the end of the night, we’d arranged our first date.

Well, I say “we”. She got bored of waiting for me to pluck up the courage, so she asked me out. Still, we got there in the end.

But if it weren’t for the bizarre circumstances of our first meeting, we never would have. I’d most likely have never said hello to someone I fancied if I hadn’t been buoyed by the confidence of being in my own flat. It wouldn’t have felt so special if we hadn’t resigned ourselves to never meeting again. And I wouldn’t have realised how much more I fancied her when she wasn’t dressed as a facepaint-wearing male pop star. As I said, it’s the story of your classic Hollywood romcom: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy goes to sleep alone in shellsuit before girl gets him back.

It’s a story that we cherish as being uniquely our own. It’s one we love to tell people. In fact, we love it so much that only 12 months ago, I told it at our wedding. That “first” changed my life for the better forever – and there are not many things you can say that about.

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