A windy road to happily ever after

There have been a few false starts, but Andrew and Trish Spooner are finally husband and wife after 30-odd years, one failed engagement and plenty of long-distance correspondence. Britt Coker finds out more.

Is there really such a thing as one true love? Susan Marr Spalding describes the experience in her poem, Fate “…That, one day, out of darkness they shall meet, and read life's meaning in each other's eyes.” In The Princess Bride, Miracle Max also cites its existence, rating the experience a commendable second place. “True love is the greatest thing in the world… except for a nice MLT, mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, when the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe.” But these are the words of poets and miracle men. Perhaps soul mates exist only as essential ingredients of all good verse and fairy tale formulas.

Once upon a time, a young Australian woman living in Brisbane called Trish met a Kiwi man called Andrew when she was visiting Sydney. It was love at first sight - for him at least (“He was just a really lovely guy who was willing to show me some sights in Sydney and I really appreciated that”). So much then, for reading life’s meaning in each other’s eyes.

Trish had a boyfriend back in Brizzie and thought nothing of their first meeting. But Andrew was enamoured. After she returned home, he showed up begging her to be his girlfriend. Trish politely declined. Dude, she already has a boyfriend. Fast forward a couple of years though, and her relationship ends, motivating a shift to Adelaide to live with her parents for a while. Good news travels fast and guess who knocked on the door? Luckily the stalker undertones give way at this point to a beautiful love story about a young couple who embark on a wonderful relationship together….for almost two years until he suddenly, inexplicably, breaks up with her.

“He said [recently] that there was a moment where he piggybacked me home from work one day and sat me on the edge of a wall, and he locked eyes with me and he was going to ask me to marry him but he suddenly thought I would say no because he wasn't good enough for me. That I would probably choose better. It was all in his mind. I had no idea that he was thinking those things.”

Oblivious of his insecurities and reeling from the breakup, Trish moves back to her hometown in Perth. To help her get over the relationship, she metaphorically boxes up her love for Andrew and shelves it somewhere she won’t easily find. Three weeks later she meets a guy at a party and six months later she marries him.

Trish has married a man she doesn’t love to forget about Andrew. The plan works well. She is fully committed to the marriage, does fall in love with her husband, and goes on to become a mother of five. However, her marriage over time turns out to be very difficult and it eventually ends after 23 years. Three and a half years later - for a reason she can’t remember – Trish finds and messages Andrew on Facebook.

‘Hey handsome.’

‘Hello beautiful.’

Coincidentally, Andrew’s own marriage also ended three and a half years ago, so they’re both single. But this doesn’t mean anything folks, because their renewed connection is completely platonic. He lives here in Richmond and she’s still in Perth, so he ably adopts the title of ‘just a good friend’. The box’s ties hold tight. And then…

“And then, during that seven months I think the lid of the box started to come off and I started to remember how much I loved this man and how much joy he brought to my life, and I guess the chatting got more and more loving, and then one day he said to me, ‘I'd love to see you, can we meet up somewhere?’”

She suggested Sydney for their reunion, the place where they met and where one of them fell in love. By this time, they haven’t seen each other for 30 years.

“I had come through a time of absolute emotional pain from my marriage, and I was very nervous to enter into this relationship so broken, but I also had the great trust in this man who I knew was going to love me properly, I just knew that about him.”

This time, as soon as they looked into each other’s eyes, they read life’s meaning in them.  Andrew pulled out an engagement ring and proposed at the airports arrival gate and Trish said yes, and they lived happily ever after. Well, that’s how it was supposed to go and maybe it would’ve, but this was 2020, the year of living differently. The night Andrew returned home to New Zealand the country went into lockdown and the boarders closed.

“It was a long distance relationship, purely phone calls and messages, but to be honest that was enough. This man would write the most beautiful things to me. We would have at least three calls every single day, talking up to five hours some nights.”

For two and a half years the couple continued with their long-distance love story. Her workmates may have called him ‘The Cardboard Cut-out,’ but he was pretty real to her. Despite their close daily contact, the global vibe was still very much that of isolation and separation. Andrew was pessimistic about the future and the borders ever reopening and ultimately felt the distance was too painful and that the relationship should end. Wait, what? But this is true love. Did he think this happens every day?

Trish didn’t agree with him but reluctantly sent the engagement ring back. While she was packaging up the jewellery, her feelings for him did not get the same treatment this time around. The opposite happened, in fact.

“I had a lot of dreams.  I saw myself in a wedding dress, I saw him in a groom’s suit, I saw us getting married, I saw where I would live, near the snow-capped mountains. I saw all of these things in dreams one after the other. I saw this pandemic as a giant standing between the two countries and I saw him fall down and our two countries come together. But he couldn't [see any of this], so I sent the ring back. I said, can we just remain friends and he basically said no. So we decided to completely cut all communication and all I had was his e-mail address.”

After seven months with no communication between them, Trish emailed Andrew just to let him know that she was coming to New Zealand for a two-week holiday. He didn’t know it, but she came because of those dreams.

“In a dream I even saw the date written on the side of a box of when our wedding day would be, Tuesday the 23rd of August, 2022”.

They ended up meeting for a coffee at which point he said, ’Can you just stay here for an hour?’, and then promptly drove home and returned, pulling the engagement ring out of a pocket that it never went back in to.

“He said, ‘will you please put this back on your finger and will you just stay here with me’ and in that month both of my boys decided that they wanted to move out of home and I lost my job through a back injury, and the lease on my rental ran out. So I was childless, homeless and jobless if I returned to Australia, so when he asked would I stay, of course I said ‘yes.’”

That was July last year, a month later they were married on the day she dreamt they would, wearing the wedding dress she saw she would.

“I walked into one bridal shop in Motueka and I told the girl, I've had a dream of a wedding dress and this is what it looks like, and she found it in the back of her shop.”

Over the years, Trish has drawn on her own life experiences to write three books that she launched in New Zealand last month. The first, about hope, faith and inspirational true stories. The second is a rhyming book written for young children experiencing loss and grief of a sibling. She wrote it after the stillbirth of her fifth child and the way her youngest dealt with the tragedy.

“My two-year-old had an absolute rock-solid faith and knowledge of where his little sister was. He would have dreams of Heaven and he would see her there playing and he was just absolutely delighted that she was in this wonderful magical place while we were all grief stricken and crying. I realised that his faith was so strong that wouldn't it be amazing for every child to have that assurance like he did, and that was the inspiration behind writing the book.”

Her third book is a novel inspired by true accounts of emotional healing, ‘written for women who have been hurt and need to be healed’. Women like Trish, for whom the course of true love has not run smooth. But finally with Andrew, she’s got her happily ever after.

“I love being here with him, I miss my kids and I miss my friends, but I know this is where I'm meant to be.”

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