The Story of Us

Steph and I met at a book group. Yep, we’re that cool … We were discussing Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion and Steph was being very loud and opinionated about the book, despite not having actually read it. I took an immediate dislike to her.

That could have been the end of it, but the book group kept meeting up once a month and Steph and I kept bumping into each other. Steph hardly ever read the book and I soon learned that book group was really just a sham name for drinking club – sure, there were books and we sometimes discussed them, but they were really there to add an air of respectability to what were always fairly drunken affairs.

This was about six years ago and, at this time of our lives (and to a certain point, still now), Steph and I had one very definite thing in common: we were always the last people to leave a party …

Because of this, once a month Steph and I would find ourselves roaming the streets of London trying to find a pub that was still serving at 2am on a Monday night, and it was on one of these walks that I first realised that I actually quite liked this girl who I had initially decided to dislike: she was funny, confident, opinionated and bolshie as hell and yet had a way of instantly making everyone in the room like her (apart from me, apparently). We became friends. Then we became good friends. Then she went to live in Australia.

At this point Steph and I had been friends for about three years, I had met a few of her exes and she had met a couple of mine. We had done a fair bit of flirting and had a couple of drunken kisses, but that was it. Neither of us would ever have said that romance was on the cards, but her leaving changed that …

Steph moved to Australia for a year with her job and during that time we spoke on an almost daily basis, often for hours at a time. It became a weekend ritual for us to skype (skype's a verb, right?) each other late at night, one of us cuddled up in bed, often hungover from the previous night's adventures, the other one with glass of wine in hand, drawing out the Friday/Saturday night fun into the wee hours.

If we talk about it now, then we'll both say that it was during this point that like turned to love, but at the time we never really acknowledged that anything had changed. We both knew it though and within a week of Steph being back in the UK we were officially together.

While it took us 5 years to make the leap from friendship to relationship, things moved at a much faster pace once we finally got together. Within 5 months of starting to date we were living together and by our first anniversary Steph was pregnant.

It seems quick, but our line (and we’re sticking to it) is that we were such good friends before that when we finally got together we knew it had to be for keeps. After finally getting together we wanted to get on with our lives and start a family fairly quickly, so that’s what we did.. Plus we were both early thirties and convinced that one, or both of us, would probably be infertile (I’d been carrying a mobile phone around in my pocket for around 15 years at this point), so thought it best to get started and see what happened. Oscar happened, and he happened quickly.

So that’s an abbreviated story of how we came together and decided to have a baby. Best leave it there for now. I'll cover the horrors of pregnancy and childbirth later. In detail.

Dan out. X