Sunday 14 September 2008

Javier and I

So, as many people already know I have recently gotten engaged to Javier Romero. Given that this has been a surprised to many people, Javier has written up an explanation of how we came to be together which is reproduced below:

"Wow… So many messages! Thanks, everyone, for your well wishes.

There have been many questions asked, and we realise that our engagement has caught many of our friends and family by surprise. So to being everyone up to date, I thought to write up the following…

First, to answer the basic questions:

• As for when we’re celebrating the engagement, it’s 15th November 2008 (if you’ve not got the invitation, let me know and I’ll send you the details on Facebook, which is where we’re organising the party)
• As for where we’re getting married, it will likely be in Rodden’s Scottish homeland (“civil partners” will be our legal status)
• As for when we’re getting married, it’ll be when we can afford a party worthy of the landmark! We’re thinking one to three years on
• As for when we’re getting children, it’ll be when we can afford the nanny! A dog may be in order first… heh
• As for what we look like together, here are some photos I quickly assembled from this year: http://picasaweb.google.com/javierromero1973/MyLifeWithRodden2008

Second, to answer the most basic questions of all: Just when and how did this happen? I’ll summarise this first; those who want the mushy long version can read blow.


The abridged version…

Rodden has been my best friend, as most of you know; I met him last June thanks to former business partner of mine. Well, Rodden and I realised this summer that, over time, we had fallen for each other. In fact, given that over months and months we have grown to know each other so well – the good and the bad – we also realised that we want to spend our lives together. As many of you know, though, we had stopped short of calling ourselves a “couple”; given our past experiences, we each saw the concept of “boyfriend” as temporary and saw our friendship as too important to jeopardise by taking that route. A trip to Scotland in August made us recognise finally, though, that we were just fooling ourselves: we were each others’ core relationship, and had been since the beginning. So rather than become “boyfriends”, well, we decided to get married instead. Hurrah!


The less-than-abridged version…

What would have happened had his face not been randomly generated on my friend’s profile? What would have happened had I not tried to see what a Facebook “poke” was? What if he had not messaged me in return?

In June ’07 I finally gave in to multiple requests and joined Facebook. One of my first Friends there was a former business partner of mine, Brian. I clicked onto his profile, and I saw this cute photo on his randomly generated list of some of his other Friends on the website. So I clicked on this person’s photo, got his profile, and saw that I could “poke” him… so I did (though not really knowing what that meant). Minutes later, he – Rodden Shaw – replied, thanking me for the “poke” and we started chatting.

So began a great friendship. It turned out that he worked a mere two buildings down from where I live (and often work), and so this former lodger of Brian’s – who turned out to be this outstandingly intelligent, interesting, and sweet person who had been compelled to grow up so quickly in his 20 years as he had been living on his own for years already – ended up becoming my lunch and coffee break partner for the months to come. We saw each other every week, often more. Having broken up with Daniel (a man whom I loved dearly but who’s brusque nature and drinking I could no longer handle) that same June, Rodden and I related to each other well as men who were very happy being single cute gay guys in London. From day one, I thought the world of Rodden, and he was undeniably cute, but his friendship came to mean the world to me. I knew I was coming to love him… BUT only as a friend.

Time passed, and come November I had met someone who made me think I could do relationships again: Johannes. It was a beautiful and intense affair with a gorgeous man. Oddly, I realised I loved Johannes when I found that he could distract me from Rodden (no one had ever done so in the previous months). But that relationship came crashing down only two months later around the winter holidays. And when I found myself without a date on 31st December, it was Rodden who came to the rescue in black tie, giving me the best New Year’s Eve ever.

2008 proceeded with more men as Rodden and I seemed to become more open to the idea of a boyfriend… Rodden came to have high hopes for a relationship with his friend, Rolf, and I met this amazingly sweet and sexy Irish guy called Colin; later Rodden became boyfriends with a British chap in Belgium called Richard. Our hearts flew and fell, and with every crash we found that we kept coming back to each other for consolation, counsel, and compassion.

Things started to change on 31st May at the party of our friend, John. Though Rodden wanted to stay on, I wanted to go home as a month’s worth of non-stop partying was catching up with me – Rodden offered me the key to his flat. No, nothing happened that night, but it felt such a welcoming and intimate gesture. As summer went on… and as I started to fall into a depression as my business had been struggling, and my cash flow suffering as a result… Rodden was there for me more and more. On one night that was especially bad, Rodden even took a series of night buses at 2am to come and comfort me, spending the weekend with me to make sure I was okay.

We talked and talked and talked all month. And so much started to come out, so much started to be shared. One night in late June we were talking and realised that we had become – and had been for some time – each other’s core relationship. Rodden said “soulmate” and, well, I had to admit to myself that he was right.

As the summer progressed, we just grew closer and closer. However we were two people who saw relationships as fundamentally temporary as that is what our pasts taught us. So though we knew we had these feelings, we kept insisting to ourselves and the world that we were “single” – our friendship was just not worth risking over the experiment of being “boyfriends”. Yes, we joked about being “the most coupley non-couple” in the world, but we psychologically needed to be “only” best friends.

Scotland changed everything though. In early August we went to spend a few days with his mother and meeting his family in Rodden’s place of origin, the Isle of Bute. Together every hour of every day, the feelings were too strong to hold back. We knew it: we were a genuine couple. And we loved each other, and had done for a very long time. And… we wanted to spend our lives together.

Less than three weeks later, in a moment of deliciously intense inspiration, I decided to make it formal and proposed to Rodden, who agreed to become my husband I realised that boyfriends break up, but that betrothal splendidly circumvents that. So… hurrah for us!

What’s funny is that, in telling our friends about the engagement, so many people have been saying how they saw this coming since as early as New Year’s Eve. How funny that last year’s two most confirmed bachelors have ended up like this…

Javier Romero"