OUR relationship is the best, by far. Because although we’ve been a couple for decades with children and a mortgage, we’re incredibly special because we’re not married.
Yes, our love is different. It requires no official seal. It stands on no conformist ceremony. It exists, and thrives, outside the laws of society. It is a love unchained.
As we mingle with you at the school gates, at Vilma’s ballet class, in your pubs and bars, you assume we’re married. Of course you do. Your pathetic imaginations can reach no further.
The moment when we share the truth – ‘Actually no, we’re not. We’re together purely because we want to be’ – is so delicious to us. To see your faces crumple in incomprehension. ‘Not… married?’ you mumble, stunned.
‘No, we just never felt the need,’ I continue, gaily, as if I wasn’t stamping all over your piteous ideas of happiness. As if this did not shatter every certainty you’ve ever clung to. As if it didn’t render your entire life invalid.
We never had a bourgeois wedding day. There’s no dress, no posed photograph. We’re still as wild and spontaneous as you were once. Oh, we argue in Sainsbury’s just like anyone else, but there’s a thrilling edge to it you’ve long since sealed away.
Once the secret’s out it changes everything. ‘They’re not married,’ you whisper, over glances freighted with envy. ‘Their relationship doesn’t need a crutch. It makes them sexy and dangerous.’ Yes, I nod.
And though, like fellow heretic Kirstie Allsopp, we may one day have to wed for the sake of legality, for this bloody country and its petty little laws, we have lived and loved unfettered and free.
For we are together, but not married. And for all you know we still have sex.
