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Later that night, as we were upstairs getting ready for bed, we almost bumped into each other on the landing. Instead of walking on, we stopped and looked at each other. Suddenly I sensed the strength of his feelings, and mine, and I hugged him. It just felt really comfortable and right, like we fitted together perfectly. Something, I knew, had changed for ever.
G: That night something happened. I can remember the second part much better than the first. In my convoluted way, did I reveal exactly how I felt? Why did things change that night? I wonder if Paula remembers the precise details. What I remember is that it was around bedtime. She was in her bedroom at the back of the house, my bedroom was at the front. There was another small bedroom, like a box room, which we used as an office. I don’t know what was going on but I was in that room and can remember walking out. As I did we met on the landing, we stopped, she gave me a hug and it was like, I don’t know, it was different. Then we just went to the other bedroom, her bedroom, and from then on we stayed there. How did I feel the next morning? I was quite relaxed about it. It wasn’t like we were relative strangers. We spoke about it. There was definitely no sense of “Oh my God, what have we done? Are we spoiling a beautiful friendship?” There was no fear, no wondering whether the other person had any doubts. It felt a lot more natural than that.
Gary and I didn’t feel the need to rush out and tell people immediately. I understood that my friends might have been concerned had they known, but there were absolutely no doubts in my mind. The previous experience had been painful but that wasn’t going to stop me. There are people — and Gary is a bit like this — who choose not to let others get too close, or to put themselves in certain situations, because they are afraid of getting hurt. I have never been like that. Being hurt once is no reason to lock your heart away. Hurt heals, and if you never take chances you might never find who or what you’re looking for.
It’s a little bit like my attitude to racing: I give all I can and lay everything on the line. If sometimes it doesn’t pay off and ends in severe disappointment that’s no reason to be afraid to come back again and again and keep trying. If something is important to you there is no limit to how hard you will try to achieve it. Yes, I had been hurt in the past, but it wasn’t an experience I regretted. There were never regrets.
Two years later we got engaged. Given how long we had known each other, the engagement wasn’t going to shock anyone. But Gary had this notion that before he could propose to me he would have to have a secure career and a means of supporting me. At the time he was still hoping to return to his athletic career but struggling to regain his fitness after serious injury.
His old-world view of the man’s responsibilities was complicated by the fact that I owned the house and had the greater earning power. He wasn’t going to do anything until our circumstances changed. As for me, the tradition that decreed the man must propose, earn, provide was totally irrelevant. What mattered to me was happiness and love.
The day before his 29th birthday I was out shopping, trying to think of something to buy him. There was a man’s ring I liked. But he had a ring already, his grandmother’s. I thought about the custom of the man always proposing to the woman and it dawned on me how sexist that was: the woman waiting for the man to make the move. There was no reason why a woman should not propose to her man if she wanted to. And I wanted to. But I was hopelessly torn. Should I? Shouldn’t I? Would Gary be pleased or not?
As I was flying out to Rome for a race the following day, there wasn’t a lot of time. What the hell! I bought the ring and had them wrap it up nicely. That night in bed I gave him his present and asked him to unwrap it. “But I’ve got a ring,” he said.
“Yes, but maybe you could wear this one on that finger.” That was as close to a formal proposal as I was able to get. The penny didn’t drop immediately with my ever so romantic husband-to-be. Eventually he saw what I was saying.
G: We were definitely going to get engaged, but I was doing it in my own time. We talked about it and I would have suggested it was something we should do, but I would have put it in a really twisted, cryptic way, nothing direct. I was thinking further down the line. Then she gave me this ring and I said I had a ring already. She said, well you could wear it on the other finger, “then it would be more like an engagement ring”. Doh! That’s how it happened. She asked me. Some people might have seen that as a sign of weakness in a woman, I saw it as totally the opposite. It just showed her strength.
Being male this made me ask some obvious questions. “What can I offer you? How can I provide for you?” Paula was thinking in the 21st century, I was still back in the 19th. I was saying, “What can I do to support us?” and she was saying, “Bollocks to all that, I know what I want and I am not afraid to go after it”.
Then for the next five minutes I agonised over whether I was about to lose my identity as an athlete. Had Gary Lough, one-time 1500m runner, just become Paula Radcliffe’s fiancé? It didn’t take long for me to get over that. What was the big deal? If that was how it was going to be, that was how it was going to be.
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