It was a cold winter evening. Fresh and clear. The date was Tuesday 14th February, 1995 and I did the unthinkable. I asked somebody to marry me.

Does that sound terrible? Let me clarify. It wasn't unthinkable to me but to my family, friends and colleagues. It was outside their perception of who and what I was.

I had been a bachelor for thirteen years and people were used to that. Like me, they had been shocked when the last 'serious' lady had departed from my life and that too, at the time, had been an unthinkable occurrence. Still, life goes on and we had all got used to the new situation. Well, they had. To be honest I never really got 'used to it' - I had adapted. Whilst life on ones own has it's advantages and it certainly was a valuable time for me there was always a feeling of ... hmm, incompleteness? The plain fact is, I like being in a one on one serious relationship. Sorry guys, no I'm not.

A few weeks earlier a circular had gone round the workplace informing staff of a forthcoming St. Valentine's Day dinner-dance. The price was reasonable and drinks were included. I couldn't get over that. To be honest I didn't really believe it. In most similar cases it usually meant only the first drink was free. However, as it turned out it really was true. You could drink all you wanted all evening long, albeit there were no strong liquor drinks available.

Anyway, I decided it would be a nice evening out and something of an interesting experience for my Swedish girlfriend. She'd only been in the country (England) a little over four weeks and everything was still strange and exciting for her. So I bought two tickets and at that time I had no notion of a marriage proposal.

I don't know where the idea came from. It was just a few days before the event that I first started to toy with the idea of proposing at the St. Valentine's dinner-dance. I didn't mention the idea to anyone. This was all secret inside me. And like I said, nobody would have thought there could be such a romantic beast roaming about unchecked in my head. But there was, because by the day of the dinner-dance I had not only decided to propose but I was going to make it something of a memorable and special event. I had a plan.

The relationship under discussion here was actually only a few months old. You might then be forgiven for thinking that I was being a little rash. My plan involved getting the disc jockey to call my girlfriend up onto the stage and I was going to propose to her, on stage, in public, and in her own language. My God! What if she said, No? Do you know, I never even considered the possibility. I was that sure of my intended.

I would like to go on and tell you the full story of how Katarina and myself first met. Of the immense problems we faced. The resistance and even the maliciousness that we had to overcome during the first few years of our relationship. Even to this day, some thirteen years on we are still 'paying', at least financially anyway, the price of our decision to be together. It's quite a story but far too long for an article such as this. What I will tell you is that these initial difficulties did not deter us. In fact it made us look at our situation and discuss it in detail. The result was that we had already decided that we were going to live together for the rest of our lives no matter what. I find it strange now looking back and I realize that whilst we had decided to be together we had never discussed marriage. The question of marriage only came up that Tuesday evening, 14th February 1995.

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