20

It was twenty years ago today, as the song goes. In around two and a half hours' time, it will be exactly 20 years, to the minute - 9:05 PM on November 12 1991, in a pub in Ashton-under-Lyne, under circumstances that seemed to have been concocted by fate with the maximum degree of unlikeliness possible. I'm talking about my first meeting with the young woman who would, some 18 months later, become my wife. How unlikely was it? Well, in the first place, the meeting wouldn't happened had I not been burgled that morning, because I was only there at the invitation of a friend of mine, who'd helped me to sort out the mess the burglars had left behind, his reasoning being that if I was left to my own devices I'd have gone out and got drunk - and he may well have been right. He was due to meet his fiancée, as she was at the time, in the aforementioned pub, which I'd never been in before, and only made one subsequent visit to, near where she worked, when she finished her late shift as a student nurse. I'd met her a few times before, but she wouldn't, of course, have known that I was going to be there, and, equally unbeknownst to my friend, she'd invited one of her work colleagues to come along. Thus it was that two people with at least a couple of degrees of separation came to meet, and I don't think it's too fanciful to say that if we hadn't met that night, we would probably never have met at all.
The question, of course, is whether, overall, that chance meeting was a good thing, for both of us, or not. I fell in love with her, rather quickly and pretty heavily - almost too quickly and heavily, because she came close, not long afterwards, to dumping me because I was being too intense (nothing new there, then!) - and, as is usual in my case, the love has remained, even in the difficult times of recent years, but does that, in itself, prove that it was the right thing to do to enter into a long-term relationship? Because, and although I might have wanted it not to be true at the time, I was gay then, and I'm gay now. Obviously, I'm at least functionally bisexual, because, amongst other things, my daughter came along in due course, but that doesn't change the fact that, ultimately, I'm a gay hebephile, attracted to the same group, pubescent boys, that I was attracted to when I was a pubescent boy myself. I've tried to be the best husband I can, but I've never been as good as my wife could have found in someone else, and never will be, because my deepest desires lie elsewhere. There's always that element of my playing a part, rather than my heart being 100% committed to where I am. And there is, of course, the possibility of my true self being unmasked, deliberately or accidentally, and my wife concluding that I've been maliciously deceiving her all these years. As I've said several times before, there are no easy answers. Would that there were.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B