The moment I knew: he arrived at our wedding with a garbage bag full of marigolds | Relationships

In 2003 I was 17 years old and working in a 24-hour restaurant in the middle of Brisbane. I was a first-year art student who took herself far too seriously to become embroiled in a passionate love affair with a 19-year-old bartender with gelled-back hair who wore pointy white leather shoes and a big gold chain over his muscle tee. Or so I thought.

I had notions of becoming some incredible artist in a creative power couple and Ivor completely slid beneath my defences because that wasn’t what he was about at all. Instead, he had this amazing capacity to make me laugh, we could talk for hours with no awkward pauses and I never felt as if I had to show up as someone cool, edgy or artistic. I could be exactly as who I was – which at that point was probably a pretty superficial, horrible person – but he seemed to adore me regardless. Looking back, it allowed me to put down the facade and relax into who I was.

We hid our romance for months and while my ego had me pulling back, he pushed forward. Eventually he told me he had feelings for another girl at work and that was my undoing. In hindsight, I think that was just a very well-played hand on his part. But it worked, I came to my senses, dropped the attitude and was all in.

Several years later we were working for my parents who had turned their home into a wedding venue. It was a really cynical introduction to the world of nuptials. We saw it all: the horse and carriage weddings, dove releases, every bell and whistle weddings. And they weren’t all happy endings. We stopped sending anniversary cards out because we kept getting responses that couples had broken up. Because of that I thought we were on the same page: seeing weddings as performative and pointless.

By 2022 we’d been living in Indonesia for about nine years and were headed down the path of IVF, but to have access to it in Indonesia, you have to be a heterosexual couple of the same religion and be married.

We needed to provide baptismal and marriage certificates and the only church in our area was a Pentecostal ministry. While we’re both spiritual people, we regarded the process as a legal formality, or at least I did.

On the day we were to be baptised in our own swimming pool, then wed, Ivor headed out for an errand that should have taken 10 minutes. As the minister pulled up two hours later, Ivor burst through the front door like Kramer from Seinfeld. He’d shaved off all his pink and blue hair, because he obviously thought it wasn’t very Pentecostal, and had a garbage bag full of marigolds. I was like: “What the hell?”

Before I knew it he had dropped to his knees next to the pool and was creating this giant flower mandala.

In that moment I saw that this was something important to him. It wasn’t just a technicality; he was such a romantic at heart. I remember it so clearly, suddenly having this very deep impression of how fortunate I was to be the keeper of that heart, how privileged I was to be the one who gets to hold it and look after it. As I said my vows later that day, I meant every word of them. I absolutely feel like we got married on that day.

For the whole 20 years we’ve been together Ivor has always been a supporter of and believer in me. But when you’re with someone that long and from such a young age, it’s easy to take things for granted. That day was a breakthrough. It reminded me that we didn’t just end up together and never break up. There was nothing inevitable about us. We chose this and every day together is a gift. I know now, more than ever, how lucky I am.