Alanna was happily married, in the midst of trying for a second baby when she had a chance love at first sight moment, that most definitely wasn’t with her husband…
Welcome to the Divorce Diaries. In our past instalments over the last year we’ve covered everything from when you’re most likely to divorce to whether they’re contagious to whether being on the contraceptive pill can effect your chances! and have now spoken to dozens of women – including one whose husband announced he was leaving her to have an open relationship with a 19-year-old, another who was quite literally ghosted by her own husband and one who discovered the real reason her husband divorced her was because he had a baby with her SISTER.
If you have a topic you’d like to discuss, share your thoughts, experience or advice about, drop a line to [email protected].
It was absolutely pouring with rain. Hoping in vain that it might ease, Alana had left it to the last minute to leave her house to still make it to playgroup with her 18-month-old.
She worked three days a week, spending Mondays and Fridays alone with her son – and every second Monday she always made the effort to take him to the local playgroup, for both his sanity and hers.
But after she’d made a dash for the car, successfully bundled her son inside without getting completely soaked to the bone, she made it up their shared driveway to discover the new neighbour was blocking the driveway. It was impossible to squeeze past.
She thought about just going back home, but, they’d gone to all the effort to make it this far – plus, she was dying for a proper coffee.
So, she stopped the car, pulled her son out of the car and ran to the neighbour’s front door, giving it a few loud knocks.
“I was trying not to feel too angry about how they’d parked,” she says. “I knew they’d just moved in the week earlier, so I didn’t want the first time we met to be an angry one!”
She heard a few sounds that were not too dissimilar to what she was used to in her house – the surprisingly loud footsteps of a toddler running and squealing, and a man obviously chasing after them. Alana saw his shadow, wrangling a little child, approaching the door through the frosted glass as he approached the door to open it.
“And then, everything in my world changed,” she says. “I can’t explain it. I’d never felt anything like it. He opened the door and we just stood there smiling at each other for a long time. It was electric. Everything left my mind.”
Her new neighbour was around a similar age to her, and was holding an almost-two year old girl.
And, it was almost certainly love at first sight.
An instant love, despite the fact that they were both holding their young toddlers and both married. Alana and her husband had even been trying for a second baby for the last six months.
“I still feel terrible saying it, but the fact I was married went out the window, the fact I was going to play group and needed him to move his car went out the window,” she says.
After a long time just smiling at each other, they held out their hands and introduced one another. “I think I said, ‘I’m Alana! You’re my new neighbour’. He took my hand and it gave me goosebumps. He told me his name was Greg.”
We stood there just smiling at each other for a while, until he looked down the driveway and realised he was blocking her way.
“Then I remembered why I was there and if he could possibly move his car,” she says.
She watched his little girl, while he moved the car, then he held an umbrella out as we walked her and her son back to their car.
“There was a weird pause before he shut the door,” she says. “Like that moment at the end of a first or second date when you’re not sure if you should kiss or not. It was insane. We’d only said a few words to each other!”
Alana drove to play group in a daze. For the next few days she wondered if she’d imagined it. Her husband asked if she’d met the new neighbour. She knew she was blushing when she said yes.
She saw him drive past her that week and they gave each other a polite wave, while she felt an odd pang inside.
“I decided I needed to stay as far away from him as possible,” she says. “I wanted to stay with my husband.“
So Alanna did. She stopped leaving the house on days she knew he was home so that they didn’t cross paths. Things felt so complicated for Alana that she suggested to her husband that they move.
“I had this huge attraction to him, yet I knew nothing about him and I certainly couldn’t act on those feelings,” she says.
Three months later they put their house on the market and bought in a different suburb – closer to her husband’s workplace.
A week before they were moving, while she was home alone, Greg knocked on the door. A courier package for Alanna had been mistakenly delivered to them. She offered Greg a cup of coffee, hoping he would say no, but he took her up on the offer.
“We got talking and still, there was something electric between us,” she says. “It was magnetic.”
Eventually Greg said he better get back to work. But he stopped as he was leaving and said, “I wish you weren’t moving.”
“I felt like I was going to kiss him then, but I stopped and jumped back,” she says. Alana says they then talked about how nothing could happen because they were both married and actually it was probably better that she was moving.
“Acknowledging that there was something there only made it worse,” says Alanna. “Before then, I could tell myself that it was one-sided, but it obviously wasn’t.”
She feels embarrassed remembering it, but in the first weeks after they moved, she found herself driving around their old suburb, hoping to see him.
“It was like when you were a teenager and you drove past your crush’s house, or your ex-boyfriends,” she says.
Then, two months after their move she got a message in her Facebook Messenger inbox. It was from Greg.
“It gave me butterflies seeing his name and picture,” she says.
Greg had tracked her down on Facebook to tell her that it was wrong, but that he couldn’t stop thinking about her. It was an insane gamble, but he wondered if she would be open to getting a coffee together. Maybe if they met up and spoke properly they might break the spell, realise they’re not meant to be and could go back to living their happy lives!
“I knew it was probably a bad idea, but I still went,” says Alanna.
She thought it might last half an hour, but she ended up calling work and saying she couldn’t come back to the office – their coffee date lasted five hours.
“I went home that night knowing that I had to end things with my husband, which was horrible,” says Alanna. “I felt so terrible hurting him, because he did absolutely nothing wrong, we had a lovely marriage. I just ended up on the doorstep of my soul mate, somehow.”
Alanna says she ended up telling her husband that weekend and letting him know their marriage was over.
“At first he thought I’d been having an affair,” she says. “Then, when I explained we’d never even kissed – the most we’d done was shake hands, he thought I was insane and the whole thing was insane. He was so hurt but he said he knew I was making a mistake and would be back in a few weeks.”
Alanna says she felt absolutely terrible and devastated, but at the same time she felt absolutely elated and in love.
She took things slowly with Greg – renting a place of her own.
“I lost a lot of friends over it,” she says. “A lot of people didn’t understand. My own parents didn’t understand – they thought I’d lost my mind.”
But, three months later, Alanna moved in with Greg. Two years later, they got engaged. They’ve now been married for 15 years and have two children together, plus their two children from their first marriages.
“Greg is the love of my life,” she says. “I still get butterflies when I see him. The spark has never gone away. I worried that leaving my husband and following my heart would be the biggest mistake of my life, but it has only brought me immense happiness.”
