A while ago I star­ted to write an auto­bi­o­graph­ical account of how Anne-​Marie and I met. I have kept post­pon­ing this next part, because it has become rather fuzzy in my mind over the years, and I didn’t keep very good journal records back then. Thank­fully, Anne-​Marie did, and last week I found an elec­tronic backup of all our Instant Mes­saging con­ver­sa­tions and email exchanges. So, using my memory and these resources, I will attempt to retrace these early events.

Before I pro­ceed, I need to make a cor­rec­tion. Accord­ing to Anne-Marie’s journal, I pro­posed to her on the 18th of Feb­ru­ary, not the 14th. There had been an exchange of let­ters con­tain­ing hints, dur­ing the days lead­ing up to the pro­posal. Neither of us is cer­tain of the exact date, but that isn’t really import­ant in the grand scheme of things.

Telling my parents

Dur­ing the two weeks lead­ing up to the pro­posal, I was liv­ing at my parent’s home and had been spend­ing more and more time on the Inter­net at bizarre hours (after mid­night). I think they believed I was play­ing com­puter games online, but the Inter­net was expens­ive back then (think 56k modem), and we were pay­ing by the minute, not once per call. As our rela­tion­ship grew strong and I star­ted to think about mar­riage, I became more and more uneasy about telling my par­ents what was happening.

Once I had pro­posed to her, real­ity hit me like a ton of bricks. No one in my fam­ily knew any­thing about this rela­tion­ship. I had never dated any girl, and Inter­net rela­tion­ships were almost unheard of back then (at least in France). I star­ted to get strong anxi­ety at the thought of telling my par­ents. I didn’t fear their response, I just feared the embar­rass­ment. The longer I waited, the more stressed I became, to the point of feel­ing phys­ic­ally sick. After a few days I decided that I was being stu­pid, and that I would even­tu­ally need to tell them, so I should do it sooner rather than later.

I couldn’t bring myself to sit­ting down with my par­ents and explain­ing my decision to them. I had never felt com­fort­able shar­ing my intim­ate feel­ings with them, and even after a 2-​year mis­sion, things were not very dif­fer­ent. So I decided to write my mum a short let­ter explain­ing as much as I could in it, so I wouldn’t need to explain it verbally. I then walked into my mum’s bed­room, told her I had some­thing for her to read, left the let­ter on the bed and quickly left the room, walked down­stairs, sat on the couch and waited for everything to start happening.

Look­ing back on this event, I can see why it was so dif­fi­cult to do. This was the psy­cho­lo­gical shift between the sur­real, fantasy-​like rela­tion­ship I had developed with Anne-​Marie, and the hard real­ity that I was going to get mar­ried dur­ing that year. Telling my par­ents was the decision to make everything offi­cial, to change from the private to the pub­lic, to put into action the most import­ant decision of my life. I guess that part of me wanted the romance to con­tinue like a fic­tional drama, a private fantasy that val­id­ated my yearn­ings to be wanted, accep­ted and trus­ted. I also didn’t want people to judge Anne-​Marie, and felt that there was no pos­sible way they could under­stand how deep our rela­tion­ship was, and how I had come to make this life-​changing decision in so short a time.

As I sat on that couch, sweat­ing and not know­ing what to expect, I said a silent prayer that my par­ents would accept my choice. Then I heard my mum rush down the stairs, and the embar­rass­ment began... She was cry­ing, of course, and gave me a big hug, to the great bewil­der­ment of my broth­ers who were doing vari­ous things around the house. I can’t remem­ber what was said, except that one of my broth­ers stood there look­ing very con­fused, after everything had been explained, and asked «What is going on?», at which we had to re-​explain everything.

As it turned out, both my par­ents were extremely sup­port­ive of my choice, to a degree that sur­prised me. They imme­di­ately star­ted to make pre­par­a­tions, and wanted to get as involved as pos­sible with it all. They didn’t ques­tion my decision, once I explained to them that I felt inspired to do what I was doing. My broth­ers, as usual, didn’t say much about it. We never talked about emo­tions back then, and we still don’t do it much today.

Once that epis­ode was over, I felt immensely relieved, and was glad to be able to share some of this jour­ney with my family.

The plan

Our ini­tial decision was for me to come over to Aus­tralia to visit and spend some time with Anne-​Marie. How­ever, dur­ing the next few days, as we prayed about it we didn’t feel right, it didn’t seem like the best decision. We talked about it some more, and after a few ini­tial plans, decided that she would come over around July, spend a few months with my fam­ily, and then we would get mar­ried civilly in France (required by law), then sealed for time and etern­ity in the Lon­don temple the fol­low­ing day.

The big prob­lem with that plan, as you might astutely deduce, was the wait! 6 long months of Inter­net cor­res­pond­ence before we could finally meet in the flesh, what an agony! And indeed it was, but we didn’t really have much choice. To alle­vi­ate the pangs of sep­ar­a­tion, we decided to call each other on the phone from time to time. Our first phone call was on the 24th of March 2000. We talked for an hour and a half, and it was a won­der­ful exper­i­ence, adding yet another dimen­sion to our relationship.

On this point I need to expound a bit. I assume that for most couples who end up mar­ry­ing each other, the rela­tion­ship begins with the phys­ical attrac­tion, as they first see each other and appre­ci­ate each other’s look. Then the social, emo­tional and finally spir­itual dimen­sions of the rela­tion­ship tend to develop, although not all of them do. I cer­tainly remem­ber «fall­ing in love» a few times in my school years with beau­ti­ful girls, although my feel­ings were always unilateral :)

For Anne-​Marie and I, the rela­tion­ship star­ted almost imme­di­ately with the spir­itual. We prayed together, fas­ted together, shared our most intim­ate feel­ings with each other long before we had any sort of phys­ical attrac­tion to each other. Because of this, when the time came to meet each other in the flesh, we already knew each other extremely well. I will get back to this topic later, it is quite inter­est­ing and dif­fi­cult to describe.

Return­ing to the wait­ing, these 6 months were a real tor­ture. We loved each other bey­ond the abil­ity of any word to describe, we felt a kin­ship and a bond that was unlike any­thing we had ever exper­i­enced. We knew we could trust each other with any­thing, even our own lives. We longed to be with each other, to spend time doing things together instead of just com­mu­nic­at­ing by writ­ten text. It was so difficult.

In the next part, I will tell about the incred­ible chain of events that star­ted when Anne-​Marie landed in Paris and cul­min­ated in our wed­ding and arrival in Aus­tralia. Don’t worry, you won’t have to wait too long for this cliff-​hanger, not more than a week or two :)