Exchanging vows with my handsome groom on a beach in Hawaii as the sun set behind us, I knew I looked the very picture of the happy bride. In my £2,000 pearl-encrusted wedding dress, my hair caught up in my mother's family tiara, I'd never felt more beautiful. Total strangers at our £1,400-per-night resort were caught up in the romance of it all, throwing leis — Hawaiian garlands of flowers — at our feet.
No one watching could have supposed we were anything other than madly in love. But the truth was, as fond as I was of Erik, my gorgeous new husband, he didn't set my world alight. Tess with her husband Erik, whom she met in 2001 at a friend's wedding in Florida.
'I was 34, I'd been divorced two years, and was still nursing a heart broken twice over,' she writes Erik and Tess married in Hawaii, with just a priestess as a witness. 'In my £2,000 pearl-encrusted dress, my hair caught up in my mother's family tiara, I'd never felt more beautiful' There were no butterflies in my stomach at the thought of marrying him, and I didn't feel a tingle of excitement when he entered a room. He wasn't my Prince Charming, but Mr Safe-and-Secure.
Which is why, when I read the recent confession in this paper of a woman who'd settled for a man she wasn't in love with, I felt a bolt of recognition. Like her, I'd already done the head-over-heels love story with my first husband, an award-winning war correspondent 17 years older than me. He'd swept me off my feet: on our first date, he'd taken me flying in a light aircraft, and he proposed to me on our second.
But our marriage had ended in bitter divorce after six years and two little boys. I'd then ricocheted into the arms of a diamond merchant from Lebanon, with whom I had the most intense chemistry I'd ever known. I fell for him hard and fast, but he had no intention of taking on my sons, Henry, then seven, and Matt, four.
When he abruptly ended things, I was absolutely devastated. What I needed was the opposite of..
. Tess Stimson.
