The calamity of choice is that the most innocuous of words or gestures could change the rest of your life. That is also its great fortune. And, I think, with all the important choices we can make in our relationships, there’s something profoundly terrifying about the first few we make, because they dwell in the unknown.

So what does a marriage look like, before it even happens?

“I was at work, phoning pharmacies for orders, when all of a sudden, I see this brightness.”

This is Stefan Cassar, talking about the time he worked at the reception desk of an importing agency during his first year of university, describing the first time he met his wife.

“Don’t go saying rubbish!”

And this is Tutzi, keeping the story grounded, adding how, “I was working, sent by the government to invite all the importing agencies to a pharmacy symposium. Stefan was at the reception area of one of the companies I went to. ‘I’m from the Ministry of Health, we have these invites for you,’ I told him. And he goes, ‘Thank you, bye, Tutzi!’, and I went ‘Tutzi? How does he know me?’ So I turned round to this girl I was with and all of a sudden he’s laughing and there’s all this stupid excitement. Then I go to the symposium, and we’re both at our stands.”

“In the meantime I went on Facebook and checked her­ our,” Stefan adds.

“No, it didn’t exist in those days. You were just asking around.”

For the record, this kind of ping-pong couple repertoire kept happening, so I’ll have to skip over some segments, for the sake of both brevity and clarity.

Stefan and Tutzi hit it off at the symposium, hanging out, talking, laughing. Then there was a party the following week for the students of the pharmacy department. She’s in her third year and he’s in his first year. Tutzi asks for a lift to the party, which was in Salina. He accepts, and she thinks, ‘Cool, good way of engaging’.

The party is cancelled. They don’t meet again for two or three months. Then the same party finally happens.

There is this whole preamble before it, a weaving of near misses that results in this relationship that is happening slowly, behind the scenes, and then all at once

“In my pride, I don’t ring him up again,” Tutzi explains. “If he wants, he can ring me up and take me to the party.”

“In the meantime I had started university, and we had some students over for an exchange, and I invited a girl to go with me,” Stefan recalls.

“So I arrive there and I see this green runner bean, dressed in green from head to toe, sort of like Peter Pan, and I was so annoyed. It was a Spanish night.”

“Runner bean?” I interject.

“Yes, she looked like a runner bean.”

“So she was skinny?”

“Skinny, yes. She was an aerobics teacher.”

“American, blonde, pretty, in my class,” Stefan explains.

“Anyway, I saw him with her, and we didn’t speak again. Then... Then what?”

“Then I got stood up by this American girl.”

“Then a few months later…”

“We met at Saddles bar…”

“Then we started meeting at Saddles again, we started talking again, and then I said ‘I’m going to spoon-feed the guy. So I made a spaghettata,”

“Typical way to a man’s heart... through his stomach.”

“... and I wanted to invite him obviously. In those days no one invited anyone home, not like today.”

“So it was a significant step?” I ask.

“Yes. Especially considering that I had never cooked in my life. I even bought a whole dinner set because I was embarrassed about how we used to eat from different plates, some of them chipped. My mother, was excited, of course. I made this very normal amatriciana sauce...”

“Which totally worked,” Stefan adds. “In fact, 10 years down the line, we used it for another couple, and it worked.”

“They’re still married.”

“So if you have somebody in mind...”

“I made my friend invite him, we got a couple of other couples, and a few singles.”

“Not to make it too obvious.”

And so they ate, and joked, and talked, in this group of about three couples and four single people. Stefan was the last to leave, at two or three in the morning, with Tutzi silently urging him on to pop the question. He doesn’t, and they call it a night.

The next day they both go to the 7.30pm mass at St Patrick’s, not knowing if the other would be there, but somewhat expecting it because it’s where a lot of people went. After mass, Stefan asks her if she wants to go watch a movie. She accepts. Then someone else overhears this and invites himself, and another girl, along with them. So the first date was “really bad movie, absolutely hopeless, stupid movie, some science fiction thing” at the Alhambra cinema, after which Stefan took Tutzi back to her car at St Patrick’s.

So they are chatting, again. Tutzi has work the next morning, and again the question is ricocheting in her head. Come on, pop the question. But enough is enough, and she says she has to go.

“And being the gentleman that I was…”

“He gave me a peck.”

“On the cheek.”

“And in my frustration, I say, ‘Is that the best you can do?’.”

And so, that’s how the first date really went down, though it wasn’t really a first date. There is this whole preamble before it, a weaving of near misses that results in this relationship that is happening slowly, behind the scenes, and then all at once. Before he knows it, he is taken to her prayer group, and meeting her prayer group friends.

I ask them how emotional their encounters were. If they felt those excited flutters, knotted stomachs, and all the other things that can be alliterated as enthusiastic expectations. The feelings that people like myself are both reluctant and all too eager to relinquish to.

“You get excited, you have to have that bit of a spark,” Stefan says.

Then he tells me that first time they met at the pharmacy he kicked himself five times before the word ‘Tutzi’ came out, the very act that, we see, had piqued Tutzi’s curiosity in the first place, after her interest, of course.

I ask what they had liked in each other, what set them apart.

She tells me how comfortable she felt with him, how it was different to the guys she had dated before – these men with established careers that she felt the need to try and fit in with – she could just be with this guy that was on her level, a student like her, whom she could be normal with.

This guy that was open to everything, that greeted the fact that she went to prayer meetings with an ‘aha?’ not an ‘uh-huh’, an instant openness with the promise of coming to see, one day.

Stefan tells me how he didn’t feel like he was forcing conversation, or making the effort to keep up the fun, how they could hang out and laugh, even though he was intimidated by her, because of the same cooler and richer guys she dated before, and because she was older – just five months, mind, but he was in his first year of university, while she was on her third. But age, of course, never matters.