Ten years ago, pretty much to the minute, this happened:

SCCAM Club, Blackfriars Pub, Glasgow's Merchant City

I can't imagine most folk have a photo taken at the moment the defining relationship of their lives commenced. It's a mixed blessing... Nice to have it recorded, but not so great to be reminded how damn goofy one looked at the time. On Y's face I can see traces of fatigue, perhaps the beginning of the post-viral malaise that blighted our first eighteen months together. On mine, aside from the unfortunate expression (© my mother), there's a lovely goatee of acne that makes me look like I sustained a shot-gun blast to the chin. Let this be a lesson to all you kids; dressing like a Dutch pornographer need not stand as an obstacle to true love.

Compare the shot above to the latest one of the two of us.

At this rate we'll resemble catalogue models when we hit forty.

Despite my demeanour in the top portrait, I was not drunk at the time. That would have been a few month's previous, our literal first meeting, at which point I was hopelessly intoxicated and far too concerned with keeping my vomit down to be aware of any Kashmiri princesses batting their eyelashes at me. Y and I have compared histories, and we're not sure that boozy night in Edinburgh was the first time we'd been in the same room either. We think our seventeen-year-old selves were within yards of one another on a particular afternoon.

Two kids who grew up in west-central Scotland bumping into each other more than once does not prove the whole concept of romantic destiny. Events could very easily have transpired otherwise. Had things gone as planned for me- by me- I'd have still been in the States at the moment this photo was taken. Had life panned out at as prescribed for Y- by others- she'd have been in the back of beyond, married to the village idiot. Never mind all the incidental "for want of a nail"-style coin tosses that had to go in our favour to make it third time lucky that night in the basement of Blackfriars. Our hooking up when we did was random. Yet discounting a higher power or cosmic force shouldn't devalue what happened, diminish how wonderfully fortunate it was, especially in terms of timing. Both of us had little in the way of commitments, allowing us the freedom to truly invest in one another. Were we to meet now, all things being equal, I'm not sure we'd last.

Does that sound like I'm saying we just "settled"? Hardly. Y, by her own admission, was a judgemental bitch at this point. And I was border-line misogynist. We were both clanking through life in great hulking suits of spiky armour. All that fell away, rapidly, beautifully, totally, in each other's company and in a way that it hadn't with anyone else we'd ever met.

These two photographs illustrate how much healthier we are now than then, but that's no great revelation. Every clinical study indicates that marriage or long-term partnerships improve our physical well being. What's not so abundant is the changes that have gone on inside. I cannot easily reconcile the man I am now with the one who wrote- scant weeks before meeting Y- about sitting alone and weeping as "the curiosity, the awe, the fear... slowly darkens into enmity, reproach and hatred." This is the diary of a horny proto-sociopath. Thank your lucky stars I didn't keep a LiveJournal back then, dear reader; your eyes would have bled with the maudlin wank of it all and I would have been arrested for crimes against language. Y has improved, enriched and enlarged my life and my self in too many ways to list, and to do so would only embarrass her yet more than I already have.

Suffice it to say my life proper reaches it's first decade tonight. I can't wait to see what comes next.