“It was perfect, wasn’t it?”: An excerpt on love and breaking up from Linda Marigliano’s memoir, ‘Love Language’

“With a well-rehearsed smile and presenter-like poise, I knew how to keep the mask of excitement on.”

On my thirtieth birthday, I got engaged. Six months later, I was single for the first time in almost ten years. I was twenty-one when we met. A long arm had reached through a nightclub crowd and tapped me on the shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “I just wanted to say, you’re a good bass player, I like your band.”

I turned to look up at the blond boy who the arm belonged to. He was tall – really tall – so it was little wonder he was able to spot me through the crowd. “Cool, thanks,” I mumbled dismissively. It was one of our band’s first gigs and I was certain that we sucked, so I was taken aback by his compliment.

He stepped past a couple of people and leaned down to ask me, “Do you listen to ESG? It sounded like that, really punk funk.”

“What an obvious reference.” I gave him an amused eye roll. I was trying to be cool, because, truthfully, I was intimidated. Gradually, though, we became friends. Ben was loyal and grounded, and eventually our relationship turned from friendship to romance. He was open with his devotion and played no games whatsoever.

He was the first to say I love you, and I knew I felt the same when we watched Howl’s Moving Castle and he ran out to get us pizzas and ice cream. He blocked my ears when we were in bed and we could hear his housemate peeing in the bathroom next to us. He was infinitely sweet.

Then, on my thirtieth birthday, he asked me to marry him. The night before, he had thrown me a party with all of our friends. The next day, my actual birthday, we juxtaposed the boisterous party with a quiet dinner for two. I tucked a teal silk shirt into linen pants and felt sophisticated as we ordered scallops and wine at a fancy restaurant.

Our conversation was stilted – Ben was oddly polite throughout the whole dinner. I watched him fidgeting between courses and imagined he was just hungover from the party the night before. I figured we needed a change of scenery, and an indulgent dessert.

Ben chose our next destination, and we pulled up outside a tiny French cafe that was always open late. We had sloshed our way there from a nightclub on the night of our first kiss almost ten years earlier.

Laying my caramel coat on the back of a chair, I sat down and looked around the inside of the cafe. I spied the pile of fashion magazines I loved idly flicking through on a table by the back wall. Ben walked over, and I smiled. “Ooh, actually, can you grab us some magazines?”

I stayed seated, pouring water from a glass bottle into chipped plastic cups, while he fetched the magazines. As he approached the table with a handful, he looked like he was about to shit himself. ‘Jesus. How hungover is he?’ I wondered.

He looked worried as he sat down, plonking a little pile of outdated Vogues on the square, slightly sticky table. I noticed a lump between the pages, causing the top magazine to hump out. Had someone left something behind after reading it? I lifted the magazine from the top of the pile and flicked it open. I gasped. A small maroon velvet box.

For a micro moment, my heart felt like it was resting at the top of a terrifying rollercoaster, before lurching forward and dropping into oblivion. Getting engaged and married was not something I had thought about at all. Words began falling out of me in clumps before he could speak. I was bumbling.

“Oh my god. Oh my god, umm. Please. Don’t get up. Please don’t make a big deal. Do not get up, but do not get down on a knee. Oh my god, please. Don’t make a big scene.”

He was looking back at me with concerned eyes, taken aback by my verbal diarrhoea. He sank down on the chair next to mine, cautiously waiting for me to shut the fuck up. When I did, he spoke quietly and slowly, like he was soothing a skittish rescue dog.

“I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you… Will you marry me?” We’d been together for a smooth nine and a half years. We’d barely argued. He was a good man. There seemed only one logical answer in the moment.

“Yes, yes, of course!” I rushed back my answer, wanting the moment to be over as swiftly as possible. Moments later, my steaming-hot sticky date pudding arrived, and a melting scoop of vanilla ice cream slid along the side of the plate as Ben slid the ring on my finger.

My insides were turning over themselves with uneasiness. Why did I feel so confused? Ben had intended this to be a tasteful and loving moment for us, in a charming environment that held historical tenderness. It was perfect, wasn’t it? It was a good relationship that ticked the loyalty and love boxes.

We took a photo of me wearing the ring in plain sight, smiling outside the little French cafe, and the next day we sent it to our family and close friends, which resulted in an absolute onslaught of excitement. The joy was infectious, and I was glad to have pleased them so immensely, but there was something in me that felt hollow.

The months passed quickly. We started making a list of wedding guests and the sort of food we’d like. We visited a few places but I would find something fatally flawed about each one. “It’s okay. We don’t need to rush,” I started to say. “This place is too wedding-y, we need to find somewhere that’s right for us.”

People were constantly bringing our pending marriage up in conversation, so I began to avoid the topic, remaining vague and casual in my answers. With a well-rehearsed smile and presenter-like poise, I knew how to keep the mask of excitement on. But it was getting harder to ignore the discomfort sitting deep within me.

Still, the thought of hurting him was too much for my brain to handle. It was natural for relationships to shift into different gears over the years, and maybe my lack of giddiness – or dare I say, increased apathy – was simply a level of ‘comfort’ that everyone enjoys a decade into a partnership. We didn’t clash overtly, we had sound values and interests that overlapped. Whichever way I looked at it, he was a great partner. So what right did I have to upend it all?

One morning he woke early. I heard him whistling throughout the house. I sat up in bed and wanted to vomit. I’d always thought when people said their stomach was in knots it was just a saying, but the forceful washing machine gut I was experiencing suggested otherwise. I went to the bathroom, washed my face and looked in the mirror. There was a tiny voice inside me screaming among the churning, ‘Get it done, get it done, GET IT DONE!’

I walked into the kitchen. There were a couple of mugs and a plate left over from the day before, sitting in the drying rack. I started silently putting them away and heard him enter the kitchen behind me. “Should we go for a walk?” he asked.

I placed a mug on the shelf above my head, my back to him. “No.” I took a deep breath in. “We should talk about our relationship.”

A few hours later, my dazed little body got on a plane and flew to Melbourne for a DJ gig. When I walked into my hotel room after doing my set at the club, I threw myself onto the big clean bed. I hated thinking about the hurt I had caused, but there was also a tiny seedling of pride that had sprouted within me. Pride in an honesty that had taken me months, and truthfully, years, to own up to. I felt like I could breathe again. I had shaken the guilt for a few hours.

This is an edited extract from Love Language by Linda Marigliano, RRP $34.99, published by Allen & Unwin, out now.