It was June 1961, I was 19, and innocently dating in the ways of that time – I’d had several boyfriends, had my heart broken once and had broken two.
A platonic friend decided I should meet Ian, as we both liked to talk. So he invited Ian – who was 20 – and me to dinner. It was at our friend’s family’s home with Beethoven’s violin concerto playing in the background, and he was right. From the outset Ian and I were totally immersed in our conversation, and I felt an immediate connection and attraction to him. Driving me home, he asked me out the following Saturday.
That first date was to an Indian restaurant in Sydney’s centre. Afterwards, we drove all the way to Palm Beach, about a 90-minute drive. There, we walked and talked until 4am about everything under the moon, including a pressing issue of the day, the pill. We had a lot of opinions in common despite our different backgrounds; my family as migrant Hungarian secular Jews coming from China, his as pioneer-stock Anglo-Australians who had lived in the same house since before Ian was born.
It also turned out that, as we were then living in the same Sydney suburb, we had already noticed each other. Ian had seen me on the bus and had, he said, been much taken by my animated conversations and cheekbones. And I’d slid down in the driver’s seat of our car while driving past a young man – Ian, as it was – washing his car, hoping he wouldn’t see that I was in my dressing gown, worn as a dare by a friend living at the top of his street.
Our second date, a week later, was a visit to one of my childhood homes in Wallerawang, almost three hours away, followed by a picnic in Lidsdale state forest. Walking hand in hand among the pine trees, we had our first kiss. And on the drive home, we sat close to each other on the bench car seats of the day, minus seatbelts.
By our third date, when we’d talked and laughed about the movie that we had just seen – about complicated relationships, in Albert Finney’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – I knew that what we had was both uncomplicated and special, that what I felt for him was well beyond any boyfriend of the past. My parents always waited up for me after dates to debrief. When I got home that evening I told them I thought Ian could be the one. That was something that they hadn’t heard before. As loving parents, they were happy because I was so happy.
Soon after that Ian wrote me a beautiful letter about how he felt. We became fully absorbed in our love, spending as much time together as we could, and making good use of the pill – helpfully provided by my enlightened father, a GP.
As our relationship blossomed, Ian was keen on us living together without that “unnecessary piece of paper” but we were both busy studying for our respective degrees. My mother, meanwhile, was absolutely focused on us getting married eventually. During a holiday in the Snowy Mountains with my parents, when Ian was about to start his final year, she badgered my father into asking him – when the four of us were in his old Holden – what his intentions were. It was effectively a proposal, to which Ian said yes.
So that was that, and I never got the one on a bended knee. Instead, we chose a beautiful antique opal ring together, became engaged at the beginning of that year, and married after his final exams. To this day Ian is very glad he accepted my father’s proposal.
We feel so lucky to have had 65 years and counting together, with our lives full of shared pleasures, adventures and challenges, and much travelling. We’ve mutually supported each other’s careers, his in public health and epidemiology, mine in social science research and writing, while having our three wonderful daughters and now, their families too.
We don’t always see eye to eye but we always have each other’s back, in our continuing romance based on love, trust and shared sense of humour.
For Ian, Beethoven’s violin concerto is our song, and I also see it as the overture to our joyful life together.
