The moment I knew: I told him I missed other people’s company so he put on a silly accent to make me laugh
In 2004 I was a young writer at the University of Adelaide. I was working as an editor on an anthology of short stories when a piece by Sam came across my desk. We emailed back and forth for a while, working on the story, but I never met him in person.
A few months later, I was out in town with some friends and noticed he was there. While we’d never crossed paths in real life, I knew what he looked like. In my fairly inebriated state I decided a great way to introduce myself would be to walk up to him and start reciting excerpts of his story. I don’t know what I was trying to achieve, but I made an impression and he was obviously flattered.
We started chatting and at the end of the night he sort of just hopped in my cab and followed me home. It wasn’t creepy at all but I definitely wasn’t letting him come in. We chatted outside my place for hours and when I called it a night he asked for my number.
After that we started hanging out; it wasn’t serious and as I understood it he was planning to relocate to Europe in the coming months. As the weeks rolled by I eventually asked him about his trip and he told me he wasn’t going. I thought, “OK, this guy must like me.” After about a year of casual dating I put some pressure on and told him to have a think about how serious he was, because I didn’t want to get any deeper if he didn’t feel as strongly as I did.
After a few days he came back, declared we were on to a good thing and asked if I wanted us to live together. I was still testing the waters, so I agreed on the condition he move in with me and my brother into the tiny flat we shared. I figured if he could handle that, this relationship might actually work out.
By 2006 Sam had proposed and we took off for Europe together on an extended adventure – sort of a trial marriage before real life set in. It was about 10 weeks into the trip and we’d been spending an extreme amount of time one on one. We had been travelling through Italy and Germany, I’d hardly spoken to anyone but him for a month and I was homesick. On a long, cross-country bus ride I finally cracked. I told him I wasn’t sure if I could keep spending so much time with just one other person.
Without missing a beat he said, “That’s fine, I can be whoever you want me to be”, and promptly launched into the most ridiculous impersonation of his very ocker Aussie cousin Ben, who I’m very fond of. He was hamming up the accent, doing all the mannerisms and just having a lot of fun with it. He went on for about 10 minutes without breaking character.
As he made a total show of himself on this bus just to put a smile on my face and ease my worries, I finally let my guard down. I knew I could trust this person to do whatever it takes for us and that he’d always approach life’s hiccups with good humour and creativity. I didn’t have to test him any more.
One person can never be, and should never feel as though they have to be, your whole world. Of course he couldn’t be everything and everyone; but as he pretended to be someone else just to make me laugh, I knew it really was him who meant the most to me.
